Over the last few months, the gazetteer of "places" that you search from the home page of "A Vision of Britain through Time" has been greatly improved.
Our original list of "places" was mostly just a list of the Civil Parishes which existed in 1911, but it now brings together many more administrative units and links to almost all the descriptive gazetteer entries of any length: the site holds the full text of Bartholomew's Gazetteer of the British Isles, the Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales, and Groome's Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland.
The way our system works means that if a unit or a gazetteer entry is linked to a place, then if you type any place-name from the unit or entry into our home page you will be taken to the relevant "place page". To go direct to the unit or entry you need to use our expert searching.
The following units and entries are now all systematically linked to "places".
* All Ancient, Registration, Administrative, Scottish and Irish Counties.
* All Poor Law Unions, Registration Districts, Sanitary Districts and Local Government Districts.
* Almost all Registration sub-Districts (96%) are also linked.
* All ancient Boroughs, but so far only 76% of the Hundreds, Wapentakes and Commotes.
* All Ancient Parishes, Scottish Parishes, and all Civil Parishes which existed in 1911.
* All urban labour markets listed in Ministry of Labour unemployment statistics, in the 1930s, 1950s and 1960s.
* All Parliamentary Constituencies.
* All Dioceses, all Archdeaconries and 94% of the Rural Deaneries.
* All entries for populated places from the Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales longer than 600 characters, and all entries from Groome's Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland longer than 1,000 characters (NB the Groome's entries are generally longer than those in the Imperial Gazetteer, and some of the Scottish settlements added based on this criterion are VERY small).
This work has involved adding 1,646 new "places" as well as getting rid of some existing "places" which were in some sense duplicates (there are issues here about what exactly is a "place", but the main criterion is that there has to be an identifiable settlement on a one inch map). The existing "places" were given point locations based on the geometric centers of their boundary polygons, but these new places have mostly been given locations based on where the main population center was, and the web site shows the relevant excerpt from a one-inch map.
We have also worked to improve linkage between the existing place pages and the descriptive gazetteers, so that almost all place pages include text from the gazetteers, and sorted out various problems with the descriptive gazetteers including a substantial number of missing or incomplete entries.
One other bit of good news is that we have some new funding to improve our statistical mapping and add data download facilities, although the latter has to be limited to users in higher and further education who can log-in via "Shibboleth". In connection with this, we will be re-linking all our boundary polygons to our gazetteer of administrative units, and sorting out some long-standing problems.
Best wishes,
Humphrey Southall
|