I was tremendously happy to read of the progress that Mr. Southall and his
colleagues at Portsmouth are making on the historical geography project.
As to his comment--
> 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...
I think that is a useful guideline for his project. The customary counties
may then have had little legal significance--and they need have none today,
in my view. Perhaps their function is mostly antiquarian and emotional. In
the hierarchy that informally defines where a place *is*--that is,
street address or similar, neighborhood or district, urban zone or non-urban
region, country/nation--the traditional county of Britain certainly has a
place, an indelible place.
But I think fuzzy boundaries will do, and map/gazetteer assignment of a
locality to a county need not be engraved in stone. (As in the 1995 movie
The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, some locality
will protest loudly that it's been placed in Leics when "everyone knows"
it's in Notts, and declare war on Mr. Southall.)
> (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 is wonderful recognition that many, many people really want this kind
of information. The way Mr. Southall describes its comprehensiveness and
functionality, I am betting that the Great Britain Historical GIS Project
will prove so popular that web space will be found, even mirror sites in
other countries.
Al Magary
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