We had a thoughtful set of questions from a follower on another platform today, so we thought it worth sharing them, together with our answers:
In summary, our posts are described as ‘odd’, with a six-fold enquiry:
1. “What does it mean that they ‘still exist’?”
2. “County boundaries have changed a lot over the centuries”
3. “They serve no purpose now”
4. “People don’t identify with them”
5. “New counties made more sense.”
It’s a fair question – but it rests on a couple of assumptions that don’t quite hold:
1. What does it mean that they “still exist”?
Not administratively – geographically.
Historic counties are named, bounded areas of the country that have been used consistently for centuries in mapping, law, and record-keeping.
Administration has been layered over them and changed many times, but the underlying geography hasn’t been replaced – it’s just often ignored or incorrectly labelled.
That’s the sense in which they “still exist”: 👉 as the enduring geographic framework of Britain, which is what they have *always* been.
2. “They’ve changed a lot”
Not in the way modern administrative areas do. Yes, there were tiny detached parts and tidying adjustments, but the counties themselves were largely stable for centuries before modern local government.
The changes you’re referring to were mostly about simplifying boundaries, not redefining the counties wholesale. That’s very different from the complete redraws we’ve seen with councils since 1888, 1974, 1996, etc.
3. “They serve no purpose now”
They serve a different purpose – and the purpose they have *always* had:
A stable reference geography (which is why bodies like the Office for National Statistics still recognise them as such – and recommend them as they are “essentially unchanged since the Middle Ages”).
3.1. Clarity – separating geography from administration avoids places being described inconsistently
3.2 Continuity – they allow places to be related across time despite changing administrative systems That’s not nostalgia – it’s basic coherence.
4. “People don’t identify with them”
Some do, some don’t – just like with any layer of place.
Yorkshire, Lancashire, Devon, Kent, etc. still have very strong recognition.
In places where administration has changed more radically (e.g. parts of Greater London or the West Midlands), usage is naturally less common – but that reflects recent administrative change, not the absence of an underlying county.
Crucially, this isn’t about telling anyone what they should feel. It’s about not overwriting one layer of geography with another.
5. “New counties made more sense”
For administration, sometimes – that’s exactly the point, but they are ‘council areas’ not counties. No one is arguing against practical administrative units.
The argument is: 👉 Don’t treat administrative areas as if they are the counties Avon or Humberside can be useful administrative constructs – but they don’t replace the historic counties any more than a council boundary replaces a river or a coastline.
6. “Why not hundreds, wapentakes, Mercia?”
Because those aren’t comparable.
Hundreds and wapentakes are subdivisions within counties, not the primary framework. They still exist, but it’s the larger counties that have been more important over the centuries as official territorial divisions.
Mercia was a kingdom, not the later territorial structure used across the country. Historic counties are the level that endured and became the standard geographic reference.
The core point: This isn’t about nostalgia or rolling anything back.
It’s about keeping two things clear:
- Counties = geography (long-standing, stable)
- Administration = systems that change
Once you separate those, the “oddness” disappears – you’re just recognising that the map has layers, and they don’t all change at the same time.
Interactive map showing the legal boundaries of the geographic counties available at