The flying of historic county flags at Parliament has become a welcome and increasingly visible celebration of county identity.
The House of Commons Speaker’s flagpoles in New Palace Yard are used to mark historic county days, and in 2025 the Government confirmed that individual historic county days had moved under the management of the Speaker’s Office.
Alongside the flag-raising, the Speaker has marked county days with photographs bringing together the county flag and MPs whose constituencies are associated with that county.
It is a simple idea – but there is a surprisingly difficult question behind it:
Which parliamentary constituencies are actually in each historic county?
Until now, there has been no straightforward national reference giving the answer.
A problem created by overlapping geographies
Parliamentary constituencies are electoral areas. Their boundaries are drawn for the purpose of electing MPs and do not follow historic county boundaries.
That means a constituency may lie wholly within one geographic county, or it may contain territory from two or more counties.
At the same time, more than half a century of changing local-government boundaries, together with separate lieutenancy areas and the widespread use of county names by administrative bodies, has left considerable public confusion about county geography.
The result is an entirely understandable problem for anyone trying to organise a county-day event at Westminster.
A constituency name may suggest one answer. A council area may suggest another. A lieutenancy area may suggest another again. None of those, by itself, tells you which geographic county or counties the constituency actually covers.
There was no reason to expect the Speaker’s Office to have this information readily to hand, because nobody had previously compiled it in a convenient form.
So we have.
A new county-to-constituency reference
The Historic Counties Institute has now completed a new reference matching the current parliamentary constituencies to the geographic counties.
It has been designed to work in both directions.
For each historic county, it is possible to see every parliamentary constituency containing at least some territory within that county.
For each parliamentary constituency, it is possible to see which historic county – or counties – its territory lies within.
This is particularly useful where constituency boundaries cross county boundaries, something which cannot reliably be established from constituency names, postal addresses, councils or lieutenancy geography.
The purpose is not to change parliamentary constituencies or to suggest that they ought to follow county boundaries. Electoral geography and county geography are different things.
It is simply to provide an accurate answer when somebody asks: which MPs represent part of this county?
We have sent the resource to the Speaker
Having completed the work, we have now written to the Speaker of the House of Commons and supplied the reference to his office for its use.
We have also made clear that the material may be circulated or distributed within Parliament if useful.
Our message was deliberately not a complaint about previous county-day photographs. Quite the opposite.
The Speaker’s celebration of the historic counties is something we are very pleased to see. The difficulty encountered in identifying the appropriate constituencies is simply another illustration of how deeply confused Britain’s different geographical layers have become.
Where, until now, could the Speaker’s Office have gone to obtain a definitive list of parliamentary constituencies by historic county?
There was no obvious answer.
Now there is.
Update: The Speaker’s Office has now acknowledged receipt of the resource. Tom, Assistant Speaker’s Trainbearer, thanked the Historic Counties Institute for providing it and confirmed that it had been circulated to the relevant members of Mr Speaker’s team, who he said “will find it very helpful”.
We are delighted that the work is already reaching the people responsible for the Speaker’s county-day activities, and hope it will provide a useful reference for future celebrations.
Turning recognition into practical information
This is also a good example of what the Historic Counties Institute is trying to achieve more widely.
Recognising the geographic counties is important, but recognition needs to be supported by usable information.
If public bodies, Parliament, the media, researchers and individuals are to make meaningful use of the counties, they need reliable ways of answering geographical questions which modern administrative datasets often cannot answer.
Parliamentary constituencies are only one such example.
The same principle applies to towns, cities, council areas, lieutenancy areas, postcodes and other modern geographies: each can be compared with the stable geography of the historic counties, but none should be mistaken for it.
The official Parliamentary position already recognises historic county days as something worth celebrating. Parliament states that the Speaker’s New Palace Yard flagpoles may be used for historic county days, while the Government has said that moving the individual celebrations there was intended to give them greater visibility and engagement among MPs, peers and visitors.
Our aim is to help make that celebration as geographically accurate – and as easy to organise – as possible.
We hope the new reference proves useful to the Speaker’s Office, to MPs and, in due course, to anyone else who needs to understand how parliamentary representation relates to the historic counties.
Sometimes the answer to county confusion is not another argument about counties. It is simply better geographical information.