What do we mean when we say the historic counties still exist?
We had a thoughtful set of questions from a follower on another platform today. They described some of our posts as “odd”, and asked a series of fair questions about the historic counties.
In summary, the questions were these:
1. What does it mean to say that the historic counties “still exist”?
2. Haven’t county boundaries changed a lot over the centuries?
3. Do they serve any purpose now?
4. Do people really identify with them?
5. Didn’t the newer counties make more sense?
6. Why stop at counties? Why not hundreds, wapentakes, or Mercia?
These are good questions, because they get to the heart of the confusion that has grown up around the word “county”.
Much of that confusion comes from treating one thing as if it were another. A county is a place. A council is an authority. A lieutenancy is a ceremonial area. A police area is a policing area. A postcode is a postal sorting tool. These things may overlap, and they may borrow the same names, but they are not the same thing.
Once that distinction is made, the whole subject becomes far clearer.
1. What does it mean to say that the historic counties “still exist”?
It does not mean that every historic county still has a county council. It does not mean that the county is used to deliver public services. It does not mean that all administration should be reorganised around historic county boundaries.
It means something simpler and more fundamental.
The historic counties are named, bounded areas of the country. They are part of the geography of Britain. They existed before local councils, before the great local government reforms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, before all of the institutions now commonly associated with county names.
For centuries, they provided the basic territorial framework for law, mapping, records, statistics, identity, sport, culture and everyday description. They were not invented by county councils. Rather, county councils were later created using county-based geography as their starting point.
That is the crucial point. The geography came first. The administration was layered on top.
When people say that historic counties “still exist”, they are not claiming that the old administrative arrangements are still in force. They are saying that the underlying county geography has not been replaced by council boundaries.
This is why a place can be in more than one kind of area at once. Wimbledon, for example, can be in London for many civic and everyday purposes, in the London Borough of Merton for local council purposes, and in the historic County of Surrey as a matter of traditional county geography.
Those statements are not contradictory. They refer to different layers.
2. Haven’t county boundaries changed a lot over the centuries?
This is often said, and it contains a partial truth. County boundaries have not been perfectly frozen in every detail since the beginning of time. There have been detached parts (amounting to just 0.1% of county areas), small adjustments, ambiguous cases, counties corporate, and boundary tidying measures.
But that is not the same as saying that the historic counties were constantly redrawn in the way that council areas have been redrawn.
The broad county framework was remarkably stable for centuries. The changes that did occur were usually limited, localised, and concerned with clarifying or simplifying existing boundaries. They did not amount to the wholesale replacement of the county map.
That is very different from the pattern of administrative change since the late nineteenth century. Since 1888, local government areas have been created, altered, merged, split, renamed and abolished repeatedly. Administrative counties, county boroughs, metropolitan counties, non-metropolitan counties, districts, unitary authorities and combined authorities have all come and gone or had their boundaries revised.
The historic counties are not best understood by comparing them with those shifting administrative units. They are a different kind of geography.
A useful comparison is a river. The course of a river may be clarified, mapped, bridged, diverted in places, or used as a boundary for different purposes. But the river is not abolished every time a council boundary changes. The same principle applies to historic county geography. Administrative systems may be built around it, across it, or away from it, but they do not erase it.
The Ordnance Survey’s early boundary work is important here. The nineteenth-century national survey did not create the counties from scratch. It set out to survey, ascertain and mark the boundaries that were already understood by repute and local knowledge. That is a very different thing from inventing new units of government.
3. Do the historic counties serve any purpose now?
Yes – but not the same purpose as a council.
Their purpose is not to empty the bins, run adult social care, manage planning applications, or organise school admissions. Those are administrative functions, and they require administrative areas.
The purpose of historic counties is different. They provide a stable reference geography.
That matters for several reasons.
First, it gives continuity. If the administrative map changes every generation, it becomes harder to relate places to each other across time. A stable county framework allows people to connect historical records, maps, censuses, literature, family history, local heritage and present-day places without constantly translating between abolished and newly created administrative units.
Second, it gives clarity. Much of the confusion around counties comes from using the same word for different things. A place may be in one council area, another lieutenancy area, a different police area, and a historic county. If we call all of those things “county”, public understanding becomes muddled. Clear language helps: councils are councils; lieutenancies are lieutenancies; historic counties are counties.
Third, it supports identity and culture. Historic counties remain widely used in sport, heritage, voluntary organisations, flags, local campaigns, family history, tourism, publishing, and public memory. Their value is not dependent on whether they are currently used for local administration.
Fourth, they help explain the country. The counties are one of the great inherited frameworks through which Britain has long understood itself. They are not merely lines on a map. They are tied to landscapes, dialects, architecture, loyalties, literature, cricket, flags, fairs, regiments, roads, rivers, market towns and local stories.
That is not nostalgia. It is geography, history and public education.
4. Do people really identify with them?
Some do. Some do not. That is true of every layer of place.
There are people who identify strongly with a town, a village, a parish, a city, a region, a nation, a council area, an island, a valley, or a neighbourhood. Human identity is layered. It is rarely exclusive.
The historic counties remain especially strong in places such as Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cornwall, Devon, Kent, Sussex, Norfolk, Suffolk, Northumberland, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Pembrokeshire, Fife, Ayrshire, Aberdeenshire and many others. Their names still carry meaning far beyond local government.
In other places, especially where administrative change has been especially disruptive, county identity may be less visible. Parts of Middlesex, Surrey, Kent, Essex and Hertfordshire that were placed within Greater London for administration and lieutenancy are obvious examples. The West Midlands and Greater Manchester provide others. In such places, official usage has often trained people to think only in terms of the administrative boundaries.
But weaker public usage does not prove that the historic county has ceased to exist. It often proves only that official language has obscured it.
Nor is the argument about forcing identity on anyone. No one needs to be told what they must feel. The point is not emotional compulsion. The point is accuracy. Recognising that a place lies in a historic county does not prevent anyone from identifying with a city, a borough, a region, or a council area.
Again, the answer is layers.
5. Didn’t the newer ‘counties’ make more sense?
For some administrative purposes, sometimes they did. That is precisely why they were created.
Local government needs practical service areas. Those areas may sensibly be shaped by population, transport, finance, public health, housing, schools, or patterns of employment. There is nothing wrong with creating administrative units for administrative tasks.
But that does not mean those units replace the historic counties as geography.
This is where much of the confusion began. From 1888 in England and Wales, and from 1889 in Scotland, new elected county councils were created. These were administrative bodies. They were given administrative areas. In many cases those areas were based on the historic counties, but they were not identical to them. County boroughs were also created so that larger towns and cities could run many of their own services outside the surrounding county council.
Over time, people began to confuse “the county council area” with “the county”. That confusion deepened after the 1974 local government changes in England and Wales, and the 1975 changes in Scotland. New administrative areas appeared; older administrative areas disappeared; names were reused, altered or invented.
This is how we ended up with claims such as “Middlesex was abolished”, “Rutland was abolished and restored”, “Bristol is not in Gloucestershire or Somerset”, “Humberside replaced the East Riding”, or “Avon replaced parts of Gloucestershire and Somerset”.
Those claims confuse administration with geography.
Administrative areas can be abolished. County councils can be abolished. Lieutenancy areas can be altered. Police areas can be redrawn. But none of that means the historic county geography has been erased.
Avon and Humberside may have been defended as administrative solutions for their time. But they did not replace Somerset, Gloucestershire, the East Riding of Yorkshire or Lincolnshire as historic counties. They were a different layer, created for a different purpose, and later abolished as administrative areas in any case.
The lesson is not that administrative reform is always wrong. The lesson is that administrative reform should not be allowed to overwrite the deeper geography of the country.
6. Why not hundreds, wapentakes, or Mercia?
This is another fair question, but the examples are not equivalent.
Hundreds and wapentakes were subdivisions within counties. They are historically important, and they still matter for some forms of research, especially local history, legal history and genealogy. But they were not the main territorial framework through which the country came to be mapped, recorded and recognised over the long term.
They were also less familiar to the general public and far less consistently used as the standard level of national geography.
Mercia is different again. Mercia was an Anglo-Saxon kingdom. It is a vital part of the history of England, but it was not part of the later county framework used across the country for mapping, records, administration, lieutenancy, statistics, sport, culture and public identity.
The reason we focus on historic counties is not that they are the oldest possible units of place. It is that they became the enduring county-level geography of the country. They are large enough to be nationally meaningful, local enough to be personally meaningful, and stable enough to provide continuity across centuries.
That is why they remain useful in a way that most earlier kingdoms and smaller subdivisions do not.
The real issue: the word “county” has been stretched too far
Much of the argument comes down to one word.
“County” has been used to describe several different things: historic counties, administrative counties, county councils, county boroughs, lieutenancy counties, postal counties, registration counties and more. Some of those areas overlapped. Some did not. Some still exist. Some have been abolished. Some were never counties in the traditional geographic sense at all.
When one word is used for many different layers, confusion is inevitable.
That is why we try to be precise.
- A historic county is a geographic county
- A county council is an administrative body
- A lieutenancy area is a ceremonial area
- A council area is a council area
- A postcode is not a county
Once those distinctions are made, the argument becomes far less strange. We are not saying that councils do not exist. We are not saying that administrative areas should be ignored. We are not saying that everyone must use historic counties for every purpose.
We are saying that administrative areas should not be mistaken for the historic counties, and should not be allowed to erase them from public understanding.
This is not about turning the clock back
The case for the historic counties is often misrepresented as a demand to reverse every local government reform. That is not our argument.
The issue is not whether a council boundary should follow a county boundary in every case. The issue is whether the public should be able to recognise, use and understand the historic county geography of the country.
There is no contradiction between having practical council areas and recognising historic counties. We already live with many overlapping geographies. A single place can sit within a parish, a council district, a parliamentary constituency, a police area, a lieutenancy area, a region, a nation, and a historic county. That is not unusual. It is how geography works.
The problem only arises when one layer pretends to be the whole map.
So when we say that the historic counties still exist, we mean that they remain the long-standing geographic counties of the country. They are not council areas. They are not administrative conveniences. They are not nostalgic inventions. They are the enduring county framework that underlies centuries of maps, records, identities and public life.
The practical answer is simple:
- Counties are geography.
- Administration is government machinery.
- Government machinery changes.
- Geography endures.
Once those things are kept separate, the “oddness” disappears. We are simply recognising that the map has layers – and that they do not all change at the same time.
The interactive map showing the legal boundaries of the geographic counties is available at:
RealCounties.com