became, is the name of villages in both Wiltshire and Somerset. Of course, each has laid claim — and almost certainly blamed some faceless official for the confusion.
Alfred proclaimed himself King of the Anglo-Saxons and attempted to unite the people of the ancient kingdoms in a military network of forts and boroughs, roads and beacons designed to ensure that the Vikings could never again catch them by surprise. He was also responsible for spreading the West Saxon style of administration, dividing areas up into ‘shires’ or shares of land, each shire with a nominated ‘reeve’ responsible for keeping the peace — the title ‘shire-reeve’ becoming shortened over time to sheriff.
A shared terror of the Vikings just about held the nation together, but a far greater test of Englishness was imminent. Another army of heathen bureaucrats was on its way, an invasion of administrators, clerks, cartographers and planners with designs on the new kingdom. The Normans were coming.
If William the Conqueror had had access to clipboards and those pens you hang round your neck, he would have negotiated a bulk purchase. In 1085, hundreds of surveyors and auditors were recruited to get the lie of his new land, sent ‘all over England into every shire [to] find out how many hides there were in the shire, what land and cattle the king had himself in the shire, what dues he ought to have in twelve months from the shire’, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle put it. Having sized the place up, he then published the whole lot in the Domesday Book, introducing a bit of Norman styling to the process. The old shires were designated counties — the Saxon sheriff often replaced by a Norman count. Both names, however, survived — just one of a series of compromises that resulted in convoluted and often tautological names for large tracts of English countryside.
The County of Gloucestershire, for example, incorporates the Roman name for the main town (
Industrialisation, when it came, was no respecter of ancient boundaries, disgorging giant smoking cities that squatted noisily across the countryside without a care for traditional county ways. In the century after 1750, Manchester was transformed from a market town of 18,000 inhabitants to a teeming metropolis of 300,000. It was a similar story in Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds and Newcastle: huge urban centres grew so rapidly that the mapmakers could barely keep up. By the beginning of the twentieth century some influential voices were asking whether the old counties, still obliged to nod their allegiance to the centralised powers in London, really made sense any more. With the Empire crumbling and the government considering Home Rule for Ireland, the question as to how the United Kingdom might best be administered was debated in Parliament.
In 1913 Winston Churchill wondered aloud about the idea of an American-style federal system in which Scotland, Ireland and Wales might each have separate legislative and parliamentary institutions, while England would be broken up into principalities or states. The great business and industrial centres of London, Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Midlands might ‘develop, in their own way, their own life according to their own ideas and needs’, he suggested. One of the great thinkers of the time, the Scottish evolutionist and sociologist Sir Patrick Geddes, was also an enthusiastic federalist, arguing that the new ‘conurbations’, as he coined them, should be allowed to break free from central control. He too envisaged a federal UK, with England divided into three regions: Industrial England in the Midlands and north; Metropolitan England incorporating London, the south and east; and south-west England including Wessex, Bristol, Cornwall and Devon.
But Parliament had other matters on its mind, not least the increasing Irish agitation for Home Rule, and the moment when English regionalism might have been seriously considered was lost. Unlike Scotland, Ireland and Wales, which revelled in their separateness, England’s cultural identity was based on the opposite — its importance within the wider United Kingdom and empire. While the Scots, Irish and Welsh tended to look within their borders to describe themselves, the English looked beyond, identifying themselves, as often as not, as ‘British’ and lamenting the devolution which diminished their sense of imperial centrality.
After the Second World War, however, the landscape looked very different: Britain’s global influence had declined and many of the industrial regions that had prospered in the nineteenth century were struggling in the twentieth. The sense of common purpose that had held England together since the Vikings was under pressure, with increasing resentment at the power and money residing in the capital. In the early 1960s, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan instructed the Conservative peer Viscount Hailsham to don a cloth cap and head for the North East with a promise of regional regeneration. But it was not enough to save the Conservatives.
Labour’s Harold Wilson crept over the political finishing line first in 1964 with a commitment to help the industrial regions, whose voters had handed him the key to Number Ten. Within a year he had created eight Regional Economic Planning Boards to administer the regeneration strategy, but Wilson was an unenthusiastic federalist and the new bodies spread a message of avuncular benevolence rather than devolving any real power. However, he was persuaded something needed to be done about England’s medieval local government structure, an historic system that appeared increasingly archaic in the technological age. Any answer was going to be controversial, so Wilson did what politicians in Britain traditionally do with a problem too toxic for elected Parliamentarians: he set up a Royal Commission, headed by a dependable member of the House of Lords.
Lord Redcliffe-Maud, a Whitehall mandarin known for his impressive intellect and safe hands, spent three years looking at England and its boundaries. But, despite such talents, his report could not help putting the reforming cat firmly among the old school pigeons. Instead of a system based on the ancient counties, he proposed new local councils based on major towns — so-called unitary authorities. It was a plan driven by urban realities rather than traditional loyalties and it was probably a century overdue.
The Rural District Councils Association (RCDA), however, was immediately opposed. Its members, the quintessence of grassroots Tories, were horrified at the idea that they would be subsumed into modern and soulless metropolitan inventions. The association’s president, the 5th Earl of Gainsborough, was the largest landowner in England’s smallest county, Rutland, and he was appalled at the prospect of being absorbed into neighbouring Leicestershire. ‘We are looked upon as a nuisance and irrelevant. We are not going to lie down under that,’ he proclaimed. ‘The fight is to save local government for people in rural areas who do not want decisions made by people forty or fifty miles away in large towns.’
Rutland exemplified the political dilemma: an historical anachronism famous for the World Nurdling Championships (don’t ask), its collection of horseshoes (many presented by royalty) and its splendid Ruddles bitter (now brewed in Suffolk), it made no sense to the prosaic minds of public administrators, but its very eccentricity played directly to rural England’s sense of itself.
When the Tories came to power in 1970, they found themselves in something of a bind: they knew they needed to modernise local government in England but, politically, they could not afford to upset traditional Conservative voters. Their attempts to find a compromise proved tortuous, and ultimately it was a doomed process. The Local Government Bill was debated fifty-one times in four agonising months between November 1971 and March 1972, as MPs argued over boundaries, place names, geography and history. The result was an Act of Parliament that, in attempting to satisfy everyone, infuriated millions.
As the law was passed, a bonfire was lit at the site of the Uffington White Horse, a prehistoric carving on the Berkshire downs. Protestors claimed to have a petition of 10,000 demanding the new county boundary be amended to prevent the figure residing in Oxfordshire. The fact that the horse pre-dated England’s historic counties by some two thousand years was not the point: the bureaucrats were fiddling with heritage.
The Local Government Act created metropolitan counties that trampled all over ancient allegiances. So it was that Greater Manchester included both parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, while South Yorkshire included parts of Nottinghamshire. It also formed new non-metropolitan counties that twisted traditional county boundaries or, in some cases, abolished the original shire completely. Somerset and Gloucestershire became Avon, parts of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire were designated as Humberside, while bits of Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancashire and Yorkshire were cobbled into Cumbria. Bournemouth went to bed in Hampshire and woke up in Dorset. Rutland ceased to exist.
It had been such an exhausting experience for all concerned that there was little appetite for further review. As a trainee reporter, I attended classes on local government administration in the late 1970s, a topic so complex and confused that I sensed every twinge of political pain in the reforms. I swatted over single-tier and two-tier authorities, boroughs and districts, mets and non-mets, trying to fix in my mind the varied responsibilities and
