Dear All
Humphrey is absolutely right to point out the complexity of the issue.
However our primary interest is the boundaries as shown on early OS County
Series maps - so given that the boundaries of 1844-88 (is this right?) are
the ones used on these maps, they are the only boundaries to have functional
significance to us.
In early County Series sheets which straddle the border of two or more
County, the map is "cut off" at the County boundary. As we retrieve sheets
by grid reference or post-code we need to know whether there is any
information on a particular sheet for that location.
Presumably we do not have a unique requirement?
Dan Re'em
----- Original Message -----
From: "Humphrey Southall" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, March 17, 2002 9:35 PM
Subject: Re: Web site and 'historic' county boundaries
> Dear All,
>
> (1) I am worried that people are looking for a simplicity that never
> existed and will consequently mislead. I agree with Richard Oliver that
> the 1844-88 boundaries are as good a base as any for those elusive beasts,
> the ancient counties BUT everyone should be clear that this is precisely
> the period when those units had least functional significance, i.e. just
> about none: from the late 1830s onwards, the new geography of Poor Law
> Unions became increasingly important in civil administration, the
> Registration Districts used for vital registration and census reporting
> were essentially the same units, and Poor Law/Registration Counties appear
> often in official reports although they were simply aggregates of the
> districts with no function of their own. These counties had strikingly
> different boundaries from the ancient counties of the same name. For
> example, in 1851 the Registration County of Cambridgeshire had a
population
> of 191,894, but of these 23,331 (12%) lived outside the ancient
> county. Conversely, 18,191 (9%) were in villages within the ancient
county
> but outside the Registration County. It was only in the 1880s and 1890s
> that Administrative Counties, whose boundaries more closely resembled the
> ancient counties, were created.
>
> (2) In an earlier message I said that my project was building a web site
> that understood change. I should say more. We have Pnds 620,000 (c.
> $900,000) from the New Opportunities Fund to build the site, and this
comes
> on top of rather more from various research funding bodies; a major part
> of our new task is converting the resources created by those earlier
grants
> into something that works on the web. Our final site will contain a
record
> of the changing boundaries of the main administrative units of England and
> Wales since the mid-19th century down to Civil Parish level; we will also
> cover Scotland, but the record of change will start later. This will be
> not an on-line GIS but a spatially-enabled database, and one of its key
> features is that users will be able to specify a point, most obviously by
> typing in a postcode, and get back a list of the different units that
> covered that point at one time or another -- you will not need to know
> which historical units covered your home area to find out about its
> past. The system will include a very extensive range of census data from
> 1801 onwards and other locally-based historical statistics. It will also
> contain images of two complete set of Ordnance Survey 1" maps, the First
> Series and the New Popular Edition of the 1940s, assembled into
> geo-referenced maps of the whole of Great Britain (inevitably not quite
> seamlessly for the First Series) and the texts of three historical
> gazetteers: The Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales (Edinburgh,
> 1870-72); Bartholomew's Gazetteer of the British Isles (Edinburgh, 1887)
> and, thanks to a collaboration with the Gazetteer of Scotland project,
> Groome's "The Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland" (Edinburgh, 1882). We have
> permission to computerise Youngs' Local Administrative Units of England
> (1979 and 1991), and although we are not now going to do this in a
> straightforward sense, at the heart of our system will be an authority
list
> of administrative units checked carefully against Youngs.
>
> (3) There have to be a number of provisos. One is that this system will
be
> completely open access and we are worried about handling the number of
> users likely to hit it (the PRO's experience with their 1901 census web
> site has a lot of people worried). This may force some limitations on the
> range of facilities we offer. A second one is that our boundary mapping
> has been created manually from 2 mile to the inch maps, so it is accurate
> to 100m or so; this is obviously not accurate enough for Dan Re'em's
> requirement. Thirdly, although our research runs up to (but does not
> include) the 1974 revisions, we cannot make anything available post-1952
> without OS clearance -- and so far I cannot get anyone at the OS to even
> discuss this even though they do not hold equivalent digital material
> themselves. Lastly, you will have noted that our list of ingredients does
> not include the ancient counties; however, we are keen to make available
> Roger Kain and Richard Oliver's work through the same system, and are
> discussing this with them.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Humphrey Southall
>
======================================================
> Humphrey Southall
> Reader in Geography/Director, Great Britain Historical GIS Project
> Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth
>
> Buckingham Building, Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE
>
> GIS Project Office: (023) 9284 2500
> Home office: (020) 8853 0396
> Mobile: (07736) 727928
>
> Web site: http://www.geog.port.ac.uk/gbhgis
>
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