The case for restoring the old counties

Christopher Booker

So many letters have poured into the Spectator offices in the past few weeks, following my article 'Restoration of the old counties', that I must apologise that not all of them have been individually acknowledged. But as a barometer, however selective, of public opinion, these letters have 'clearly shown how deeply many people still feel about the re-drawing of Britain's county map six years ago, and how much they would welcome any practical moves to undo the More unnecessary damage that was wrought. In particular they have helped to highlight the fact that feeling runs much more strongly in some areas of Britain than in others.

Firstly, let us get straight exactly what happened to Britain's ancient counties as a result of the various reforms carried out by the Heath Government in the early Seventies. The 1972 Local Government Act replaced the existing structures of local government in England and Wales by the new 'two-tier' (county and district) system, and the main changes affecting English county boundaries fell into five categories:.

1. Outside London, six new 'metropolitan counties' were formed, incorporating parts of old counties. These were Tyne and Wear; Merseyside; West Yorkshire; South Yorkshire; Greater Manchester; and West Midlands (incorporating parts of old Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire).

2. In addition, three entirely new counties were formed Humberside, Cleveland and Avon (incorporating parts of old Somerset and Gloucestershire).

3. A number of counties were in effect simply merged (e.g. Worcester and Hereford) or split (East Sussex and West Sussex) without any major change of boundary.

4. A number of counties vanished altogether, by merger, into new agglomerations: e.g. Rutland was swallowed up by Leicestershire; Westmoreland and Cumberland by the new Cumbria (which also included the Furness area of Lancashire); Huntingdonshire was swallowed up by Cambridgeshire, which also engorged the Isle of Ely and the Soke of Peterborough, formerly in Northants.

5. Finally, a number of minor (and largely inexplicable) boundary changes were made, as between Lancashire and Yorkshire, the moving of Bournemouth from Hampshire into Dorset and the shifting of the Berkshire-Oxfordshire border a few miles, with apparently the sole intention of ensuring that the perkshire White Horse ended up in another county.

Also under the 1972 Act, the 13 old counties of Wales were merged, or split, into eight new ones. Pembrokeshire, Carmirthenshire, Merioneth, Montgomery and so forth all vanished into the new counties of Gwynedd, Dyfed, Powys, Clwyd and Gwent, while Glamorgan was divided into three new counties.

In Scotland, under the Local Government (Scotland) Act of 1973, the old counties were in 1975 simply merged into new 'regions', while keeping their ancient identity (Peebles, Sutherland, Inverness etc) as 'districts'.

In Northern Ireland, under the Local Government (Boundaries) Act (Northern Ireland) 1971, the old 'six counties' were abolished, and replaced by 26 new 'districts' (five of which, rather absurdly because they are now on such a reduced scale, carried forward the names of old counties — e.g. Down, Antrim, Armagh, Derry and Fermanagh).

It is clear from the correspondence we have received that in certain respects these extensive changes have by and large been accepted by local inhabitants. In Scotland, resentment has been kept in abeyance largely by the fact that the identity of the old counties has been preserved, despite their new reduced status as 'districts' — although one or two absurdities come to light such as the inclusion of Argyll and the Island of Mull in the vast new region of Strathclyde, which is essentially the Glasgow conurbation.

Similarly in Wales, although the Englishman may still find it hard to say that he is taking his holidays in 'Dyfed', when he means that he staying in a little .cottage in Pembrokeshire, •the sentiments of the Welsh themselves, seem to have been allayed by the fact that their new counties at least have ancient Welsh names, instead of the historically rather newer English names foisted on them by the invader.

It is in short in certain parts of England that resentment has and still does run highest. It is here, in places like north Somerset and vanished Hunts., that people feel that their ancient sources of loyalty and local identity have been most crudely and unnecessarily mucked about, trampled upon and torn away from them. And it is here that any serious attempt to review the workings of the). 972 Act, with the prospect of amending it, should be concentrated.

The key word behind the whole mania for administrative re-organisation which in the late Sixties and early Seventies engulfed both the Labour and Conservative parties, was 'rationalisation'. And one of the factors which has emerged so particularly clearly from our letters from Sir Christopher Chancellor, Vernon Bartlett, Richard Cobb, Peter Fleetwood—Hesketh, the vicechairman of the Greater London Young Conservatives and many others, is how astonishingly 'irrational' the 1972 reform proves in certain respects to have been.

This is most obvious where the new county boundaries fly directly in the face of geography. The reason why the Furness district used to be in Lancashire, for instance, was not because some mediaeval bureaucrat had quite arbitrarily decided to put it there. It was because just behind it from the sea stands the great massif of the Lake District, which — now that it has been incorporated in Cumbria — separates it from its new county headquarters in Carlisle by 30 miles of mountains. Even more absurd are new counties like Merseyside and Humberside —the two parts of the latter (a bit of old Yorkshire stuck on to a bit of old Lincs.) separated by a huge estuary which can only be crossed by an expensive ferryboat or an even more expensive bridge which is still not finished.

Peter Fleetwood-Hesketh neatly summarised some of the nightmare of bureaucratic confusion which surrounds many victims of the new 'rationalised' system when, writing from Hale (which for a thousand years was in Lancashire, but is now in Cheshire), he told how he has to pay his telephone and electricity bills to Liverpool (Merseyside), gas bills to Altrincharn (Cheshire), tax demands to Widnes (Cheshire) or St Helens (Merseyside), while for electoral purposes he votes in Widnes (Cheshire) for Westminster, or for his Euro-NIP in South-West Lancs. Other irrationalities emerge so soon as one recalls that part of the original declared intention of the 'reform' was as far as possible to equalise the populations and sizes of the new counties, -although these have ended up ironically (though quite predictably) producing almost as great a discrepancy as ever, running from the new county of the Isle of Wight (as small as old Rutland) with a population of 113,000, to Kent with a population of 1,445,000.

I have already analysed, in my original article, the way this remarkable reform sprang from that 'wholesale flight from reality' which in so many ways in the Sixties and early Seventies seemed to engulf English life. In so many areas — tower blocks, comprehensive schools, metrication, new liturgies — we now seem to be going through a period of massive disenchantment with the legacies of that era. The widespread unhappiness and confusion which has resulted from the thoroughly ill-considered re-organisation of the counties is at least one area where we could, without inordinate cost, make amends for the damage then caused. Let us soberly and with discrimination review what has happened — as other contributors in succeeding pages seek to do.