I'm very pleased to see that my announcement about local government in England has elicited such strong reactions!
However, I was deliberately vague in the details before, and now I'll help to complicate the picture by introducing the finer points of the Redcliffe-Maud Report, and how the Wilson government would have tweaked their recommendations. You will note from above the existence of "metropolitan areas" - these, as in Greater London, would have been divided into districts.
Here is the responsibilities as they were laid out in the original report:
- Provincial councils: Drawing up of strategic development plans. They were to take over the functions of the existing Regional Economic Planning Councils.
- Unitary area councils: Both physical environment and personal services.
- Metropolitan area councils: Planning, transport and general housing policy.
- Metropolitan district councils: Education and personal social services.
Provinces, you say? Well, yes - there were to be eight of them, and they were to be laid out along these lines:
Largely similar to the OTL regions of England, though with Greater London subsumed within the South East. Their names are, unsurprisingly:
- North East
- Yorkshire
- North West
- West Midlands
- East Midlands
- South West
- East Anglia
- South East
Now, I may be biased, of course, but I'm inclined to prefer the term "provinces" over that of "regions". I'm aware that the European parlance is often for "provinces" to be subdivisions of larger "regions" (the exact opposite of Canadian parlance - although technically Canada has regions within provinces
within regions - but it
is the second-largest country in the world, after all) - but remember that the United Kingdom is not part of the EEC ITTL, so that's less of a concern
anyway.
As I mentioned before, the Wilson government intended to tweak the Redcliffe-Maud boundaries before tabling the relevant legislation, and here's what they had in mind:
I've coloured the metropolitan areas in blue. Two new ones were added: "West Yorkshire" (which merged Bradford, Leeds, Halifax, Huddersfield, and Mid Yorkshire - all of which would have become metropolitan districts - into one metropolitan area), and "South Hampshire" (which merged Southampton & South Hampshire, along with Portsmouth, South East Hampshire & Isle of Wight) together - the Isle of Wight was specifically noted as being its own metropolitan district within the new area, which is similar to a boundary change
I was considering (making the Isle of Wight its own authority). So there would have been
57 areas going into 1974, not 62.
I've decided to take your advice into consideration, along with implementing my own ideas, to produce these new names for the areas:
- Northumberland
- Tyneside
- Durham
- Sunderland & East Durham -> Sunderland
- Teesside
- York -> North Riding of Yorkshire
- Bradford -> 7. West Riding of Yorkshire (metropolitan area)
- Leeds -> 7. West Riding of Yorkshire (metropolitan area)
- Halifax -> 7. West Riding of Yorkshire (metropolitan area)
- Huddersfield -> 7. West Riding of Yorkshire (metropolitan area)
- Mid Yorkshire -> 7. West Riding of Yorkshire (metropolitan area)
- Sheffield & South Yorkshire -> Sheffield
- Doncaster
- North Humberside -> East Riding of Yorkshire
- South Humberside -> Lindsey
- Cumberland & North Westmorland -> Cumbria
- Furness & North Lancashire -> North Lancashire
- The Fylde
- Preston-Leyland-Chorley -> Rheged
- Blackburn
- Burnley
- Merseyside (metropolitan area)
- Selnec (metropolitan area) -> Greater Manchester (metropolitan area)
- Stoke & North Staffordshire -> Staffordshire
- West Midlands (metropolitan area)
- Shropshire
- Hereford & South Worcestershire -> Hereford & Worcestershire
- Coventry & Warwickshire -> Warwickshire
- Derby & Derbyshire -> Derbyshire
- Nottingham & Nottinghamshire -> Nottinghamshire
- Leicester & Leicestershire -> Leicestershire
- Lincoln & Lincolnshire -> Lincolnshire
- Cornwall
- Plymouth
- Exeter & Devon -> Devon
- Somerset
- Bristol & Bath -> Avon
- North Gloucestershire -> Gloucestershire
- Wiltshire
- Bournemouth & Dorset -> Dorset
- Peterborough-North Fens -> North Cambridgeshire
- Cambridge-South Fens -> South Cambridgeshire
- Norwich & Norfolk -> Norfolk
- Ipswich, Suffolk & North East Essex -> Suffolk
- Oxford & Oxfordshire -> Oxfordshire
- Northampton & Northamptonshire -> Northamptonshire
- Bedford & North Buckinghamshire
- Mid-Buckinghamshire
- Luton & West Hertfordshire
- East Hertfordshire
- Essex
- Reading & Berkshire -> Berkshire
- West Surrey
- East Surrey
- West Kent
- Canterbury & East Kent -> East Kent
- Southampton & South Hampshire -> 57. Hampshire (metropolitan area)
- Portsmouth, South East Hampshire & Isle of Wight -> 57. Hampshire (metropolitan area)
- West Sussex
- Brighton & Mid-Sussex -> Brighton
- East Sussex
The new (or retained) names are in
bold - but nothing is set in stone just yet, so feel free to continue critiquing them! None of the boundaries have yet been changed beyond the planned revisions by Labour IOTL, as shown above, but I've left 47-50 blank in acknowledgement of Thande's point about their borders potentially being rearranged.
You'll note that I went on an anti-ampersand crusade - some of those were sheer redundancies that I eliminated for the sake of sanity - 29 through 32 are good examples of that. The only ampersand I decided to grant a reprieve was for 27, since that area encompasses just about all the land area of both counties, and I didn't feel it would be right to favour one over the other. I might have gone too far with some of my geographical oversimplifications, but again, that's why I'm putting it to all of my readers.
I'd just like to say that all of these Government Areas look about as boring as you can get, at least to my American eye.
I can't help but wonder if that's because your American eye is so strongly accustomed to gerrymanders
I would assume Selnec would have a name change to something non-acronymic - most likely Greater Manchester (although it's rather larger than OTL's Greater Manchester - looks like TTL's county includes Warrington, plus a lot more of Cheshire).
I was definitely planning on dumping "Selnec" (which sounds like a brand of table salt) immediately for "Greater Manchester", which I did.
Maltaran said:
Maybe Manchester & North Cheshire? The name fits with some of the other new counties.
Alas, that double-barreling is exactly what I sought to eliminate in renaming, so that wouldn't have worked.
North Humberside would be East Yorkshire
South Humberside either North Lincolnshire or Lindsey, more likely the former as Lindsey historically included Lincoln.
I decided that Lindsey was more fitting than the unromantic "North Lincolnshire", especially since I would have been forced to rename "Lincoln & Lincolnshire" as "South Lincolnshire" otherwise. Humberside is no more - appropriately enough, I was already told about complaints with the name from the other side of the river.
That's true. Part of the confusion OTL is that "West Midlands" and "West Mercia" are both used to refer to the region and the county. Using "West Mercia" as the county name and keeping "West Midlands" as the region name would make more sense (so of course it'll never happen).
Well, speaking from my perspective in having to rename all of these areas, West Mercia
doesn't make sense in that there's no county named
East Mercia - there's no county named East Midlands either, true, but at least there's
something named East Midlands. You'll note that I eliminated any cardinal directions from any county names that only appeared once - with the lone exception of North Lancashire, as it (like Yorkshire next door) has a very strong cultural identity, and many of the people in the South Lancastrian areas would be irate if 17 were known as, simply, "Lancashire" (presumably the reason why 6 was originally named "York" instead of "Yorkshire").
For Tory renamings, I think the main targets would be replacing the more Newspeaky ones either with what the locals want or at least with more historically significant ones (even if not perhaps corresponding to that exact area). For example, Mid Yorkshire could be
Elmet, North Humberside could be
Hullshire, and
Lindsey (or North Lindsey) for South Humberside. "Preston-Leyland-Chorley" (which sounds dreadfully like a Canadian riding name, no offence
) could perhaps become
Rheged, a name for an old Brythonic kingdom that has somewhat caught on in Lancashire today.
I admit, "Preston-Leyland-Chorley" did indeed remind me of a Canadian riding (like
Dufferin--Peel--Wellington--Grey, for example, where you can also play "spot the 19th century British politician"
), and Rheged is a delightful name, so thanks for sharing that. For the record, had I not discovered Wilson's plans I probably would have renamed Mid Yorkshire as "Wakefield". And I went with "re-creating" the three ancient ridings of Yorkshire (which have only been dismantled for a couple of years at this point) - I couldn't resist once I found the plans for "West Yorkshire". Doncaster and Sheffield have been left out, of course, but (contrary to my statement above) I don't think they'd be
too put out, as they're still in the
province of Yorkshire. But since you know Doncaster
and Sheffield
and Yorkshire so intimately, you can let me know
Thande said:
I think there will definitely be boundary changes to the "Town and half of an unrelated county" type authorities in the Home Counties (esp. Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire) under a Tory government, just because the people who are greatly annoyed by this will have the government's ear.
As noted, for that reason I've left 47-50 alone, pending their reorganization. The only other two in the general area of the Home Counties (at their most broadly defined, and along their frontiers) where I see a potential problem are 40 (where Bournemouth has been tacked onto Dorset from Hampshire, though I note that also happened IOTL and has not been reversed), and 44 (which has some of Essex attached). I still changed their names because they are mostly Dorset and Suffolk, respectively, and adjusting their borders to fix things wouldn't change that, whereas the 47-50 cluster is much more interdependent as far as tweaking is concerned.
