Can anyone suggest a gazetteer that provides descriptions of mid 20th
century local government districts?
The Great Britain Historical GIS Project is computerising a wide range of
sources containing information about places in Britain from over the last
two centuries, including census statistics, administrative boundaries, 1"
maps from two or three editions (1st Series, New Popular, maybe Popular),
authorities on administrative units (Youngs, Melville Richards), but our
aim is to bring this material together in a public access web site in which
information about the same place from different sources is closely
linked. An initial demonstration system, limited to the Isle of Wight, is
already on-line and should include maps in the next month or so:
www.gbhgis.org/demo_gaz.htm
We have also computerised three descriptive gazetteers from the late 19th
century: Goring's "Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales " (1870-72);
Bartholomew's "Gazetteer of the British Isles" (1887) and Groome's
"Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland" (1882-5; this is a collaboration with the
Gazetteer for Scotland project). This material totals c. 5m words. Our
system can in fact manage information from any number of descriptive
gazetteers, and David Gatley of Staffordshire University has agreed that we
may include his selective transcriptions from James Pigot's "A pocket
topography and gazetteer of England" (London, 1842) and his "Topography of
Scotland" (London, 1837).
Getting to the point of this mailing, we are linking these descriptions of
"places" to the administrative units around which much of our information
is organised; these relationships are not necessarily one-to-one, so we
may associate a given entry for a small town with an ancient/civil parish,
an ecclesiastical parish, and a borough. However, a large part of our
statistical information concerns the local government districts created in
1894 and abolished in 1974. Even where these share their name with places
in the Imperial Gazetteer, it seems a bit anachronistic to link them to
descriptions written in the early 1870s.
Can anyone suggest a descriptive gazetteer or similar publication from the
mid 20th century that we could add to our collection? Our capacity to
digitise additional texts is limited so we are certainly not looking for
something on the same scale as the Imperial Gazetteer or Groomes -- but
then we are after entries for towns and districts, not individual
villages/parishes. One obvious problem is commercially authored and
published books from the 1930s or 1940s are still in copyright (and we are
forbidden to use lottery money to pay for IPRs).
Any suggestions welcome. For that matter, does anyone know of any
ready-digitised descriptive gazetteers from any date which might be added
to the system?
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.gbhgis.org
