Challenge: A British City-State

Freizeit

Banned
Your challenge, should you chose to accept it, is to create a fully independent, internationally recognised city-state in the British Isles with a POD no later than the 1st of January 1900. Bonus points if the city-state isn't London and has more than one million people.
 
Does the Isle of Man count if it's fully independent? Because it is in, for instance, LTTW.

Or, perhaps Northern Ireland is so small as to include only Belfast?

Or I know Berwick-on-Tweed was technically independent for a couple centuries...
 
not quite a city-state, but University of Dublin elected the only unionist MPs in Southern Ireland in the Irish election of 1918 and 1921, so maybe U of D would be a British enclave
 
Your challenge, should you chose to accept it, is to create a fully independent, internationally recognised city-state in the British Isles with a POD no later than the 1st of January 1900. Bonus points if the city-state isn't London and has more than one million people.

A German-backed city-state in Cornwall that absorbs hundreds of thousands of refugees after the collapse of Britain into a series of warring regions after a loss in the Second Great War in a WWI CP Victory world?
 
not quite a city-state, but University of Dublin elected the only unionist MPs in Southern Ireland in the Irish election of 1918 and 1921, so maybe U of D would be a British enclave
Not really. IIRC, any graduate of the University of Dublin, no matter where they lived, could vote for the University MP's.
 
Not really. IIRC, any graduate of the University of Dublin, no matter where they lived, could vote for the University MP's.

true enough, though given how close the Anglo-Irish War was if the Brits wanted it they could have had it, any ways I was just trying to think outside the "UK gets nuked to fuck" box
 

Freizeit

Banned
Does the Isle of Man count if it's fully independent? Because it is in, for instance, LTTW.

Or, perhaps Northern Ireland is so small as to include only Belfast?

Or I know Berwick-on-Tweed was technically independent for a couple centuries...

The Isle of Man isn't really a city, so I'd say no unless you could get Douglas to be some kind of Singapore-analogue.

The city-state needs to be fully independent, so Belfast wouldn't qualify.

Berwick isn't really a city, but if it got large enough then I suppose it would work.
 
Your challenge, should you chose to accept it, is to create a fully independent, internationally recognised city-state in the British Isles with a POD no later than the 1st of January 1900. Bonus points if the city-state isn't London and has more than one million people.
Pimlico? :D
 
Christopher Priest wrote A Dream of Wessex (1977) in which southern England, somewhere below London, is separated by an earthquake from the rest of the country and becomes an independent country and tourist attraction while Britain proper becomes a Soviet satellite state. This is a consensual reality created by a bunch of scientists hooked up to a dream machine. Priest doesn't give much history of the place, he's more concerned with describing alternate states of consciousness and the interactions between the dreamers.

I guess you could make this more plausible by having the independent country be the Isle of Wight (in the English Channel off Hampshire), which is 148 square miles and today has a population of 140,000. Say it becomes a financial center/tax haven with computer parks and chip manufacturing facilities. Could work, like Singapore. Let's say you have a totally dysfunctional Labor ruled Britain in the 1960s, people want to go somewhere else. The Isle of Wight is perceived as a safety valve. Let the people who're tired of I'm All Right, Jack, go there. Let the Duchess of Grand Fenwick rule the place.
 
Your challenge, should you chose to accept it, is to create a fully independent, internationally recognised city-state in the British Isles with a POD no later than the 1st of January 1900. Bonus points if the city-state isn't London and has more than one million people.

The only remotely plausible candidate for this would be Belfast.

I still can't imagine how this would actually come about. OTL, the Nationalists had no ability to take control of the north; the Unionists controlled far more than Belfast and had no interest in independence; and within Britain there was substantial political support for holding onto the north.

Still, perhaps someone could sketch a plausible scenario where the nationalists take control of nearly the whole of Ireland, and a Unionist rump concentrated in Belfast and the immediate areas resists. The British have no desire to hold onto the territory so a negotiated solution leaves Belfast with a Danzig-like status - independent, in personal union with the crown, but in a customs and economic union with the Free State. Eventually the "Free City of Belfast," encompassing a population of about 1.1 million, is regarded as a full independent state.
 
Last edited:
Top