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We have previously announced various extensions to the gazetteer of "places" within our web site, A Vision of Britain through Time: http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk The underlying database includes a comprehensive gazetteer of administrative units, originally derived from Youngs' "Guide to the Local Administrative Units of England", Richards' "Welsh Administrative and Territorial Units" and the SCAN gazetteer of Scottish counties, parishes and burghs, but systematically cross-checked and extended from census parish-level tables. However, while the administrative gazetteer holds hierarchical relationships, i.e. which county was in, plus relationships with many different kinds of district, it does not necessarily include geographical locations. Conversely, our "places" are required to have a point location, so our place pages always include maps. Most places are linked to one or more administrative units, and you can reach the relevant place page from our home page by searching using any of the names of any associated administrative units, from the original authorities or from census reports, or additional names for the place that we have harvested from our collections of 19th century descriptive gazetteers or generally earlier travel writers. The end result is that while we currently define 18,230 "places", 86,491 names can be used to reach them. If a place has more than one name, we list all names with the sources they appeared in. The new milestone is that we have now linked to places EVERY unit that Youngs defines as an Ancient Parish or Civil Parish, and EVERY parish listed in a census parish-level table between 1881 and 1961; the former includes many highly ephemeral Civil Parishes that existed in the 1890s and 1900s, often for less than ten years, and the latter includes many extra-parochial areas. "Lee on Solent CP", for example, was created on April 1st 1930 and abolished on 1st April 1932, but does appear in the 1931 census: http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/relationships.jsp?u_id=10195937 http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/place_page.jsp?p_id=22727 THE SMALL PRINT: -- This does not include a great many purely ecclesiastical parishes from the late 19th and 20th centuries, which we treat as quite distinct from Civil Parishes and earlier Ancient Parishes as their boundaries evolved separately. -- It does not include (a) the AP of "Overchurch" which Youngs lists as being within the Hundred of Broxton south of Chester, which Cheshire Record Office says does not exist (as distinct from the Overchurch in the Wirrall), or (b) the "Allotments of Moorland" (no other name) listed by the 1871 and 1881 census reports as forming part of Hamsterley sub-District in Durham, and apparently covering 20 acres: http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/relationships.jsp?u_id=10116181 http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/relationships.jsp?u_id=12798453 -- We define both Civil Parishes and Ancient Parishes as "status values" within a broader category/"Type" of "parish-level units", of which 2,779 remain "unplaced". Of these, 1,945 have the status of Township, 471 have the status of Chapelry and 263 were Hamlets; but NB if such units subsequently became Civil Parishes they have been "placed" (in our system, units can have just one type but any number of statuses). These units will all be found indirectly by searches from our home page, or more directly from our "Administrative Units Search" page, it is just that they do not link to "place pages" with maps: http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/units -- The "places" we have added recently have mostly been located as settlements on one-inch maps, and our place pages will show the relevant map. However, the majority of "places" have locations based on the geometric centre of the parish, which can be some way from the main settlement, and for these our place page shows the location on a ten mile to one inch map. However, in either case clicking on the map takes you into our map library, where you can zoom in and out between different scales of map, and switch between 19th and 20th century maps. For the recent addition, if the one inch map excerpt does not show some variant of the place name, a note will have been added explaining why we think this is the location. -- There has to be some issue about "what is a place?". It is hard to be consistent, but we try to follow the principle of "one settlement, one place", so where a parish was called "A and B" or "A with B", we associate it with A. Where a single settlement contained multiple parishes, as with Sawtry in Huntingdonshire, we associate all the units with a single place; but this gets harder when older maps reveal slightly distinct settlements. Norfolk was very complicated. Best wishes, Humphrey Southall