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