This was supposed to be a simple listing of
the counties of England, but "simple" just doesn't apply to the subject.
Many thanks to Gritchka whose advice and multiple corrections have given me some confidence that I haven't gotten everything wrong. See Gritchka's writeup below!
First of all, the "counties" of England don't cover the entire country.
In fact, the division between county-level government and municipal government
changes from place to place! England is covered by "local
authorities", but these vary in importance.
A "county" or "shire" was historically best described as the jurisdiction of a sherriff, but the patterns of population growth resulting from the Industrial Revolution made this an inefficient system for allocating local government authority in many areas.
The administrative "County" has now been defined by various Local Government Acts as a territory under the governance of a "county council". However, semi-independent local councils under the governance of no county council appear throughout the country.
A few clusters of these areas appear to have had a collective status equivalent to a county, even if there was no collective authority over them. In some places individual cities are distinguished from shires of the
same name.
If you compare the non-county entities in the list below to aneurin's
list of England's "historic county boroughs", it will not match up.
The list below represents the situation as of about 2000. A new local Government Act has replaced it with an even more complicated system!
In the list below:
Bold - county
Normal - unitary city
Normal, Italic - Herefordshire, a special case
Italic, small - unitary borough or district
Boroughs that are in a sub-list labeled (metropolitan) are metropolitan
boroughs.
Other councils are listed as towns, non-unitary boroughs and districts,
and villages, these will have to appear under the counties they belong
to. The rotten boroughs are gone, so you need not bother looking
for them.
Northeast
Northwest
East
The "London Borough" is a different type of local authority altogether. Follow the link for a list of them.
There was once a Middlesex county but Greater London's swallowed
it.
Southeast
Southwest
Several places you might think part of England are not; they're Crown dependencies.
We'll link to them here for convenience:
This is one of those projects I probably shouldn't have begun, but
having started, I foolishly decided to finish. A simple attempt
to list the counties of England without knowing the ins and outs of England's
local government structure turned into quite a frustrating experience.
I should have known this beforehand, having watched others' attempts
to turn Maryland and Virginia into a state-county-township hierarchy like the other states. I proceeded nonetheless.
The road atlas from which I started soon led me astray: It shows the
five Tees Valley boroughs individually, but does not distinguish Birmingham
from Coventry. While Web-verifying the list I got from the atlas,
I found several entities that appeared just as important, but decided
to look further and include anything that looked at least as important
as thoose five. "Can of worms" does not adequately describe
the situation I found myself in.
Fortunately, the British Home office has divided itself into several regional offices, and once having found their Web sites, and the lists of governmental entities they consider equal, I was eventually able to produce a list I had some confidence in.
Roadmaster Road Atlas of Great Britain, 1998
Oultwood Local Government Web. Amazing site.
http://www.oultwood.com/
Regional offices:
-
Government Office for the North East
http://www.go-ne.gov.uk/
-
Government Office for the North West
http://www.go-nw.gov.uk/
-
Government Office for Yorkshire and the Humber
http://www.goyh.gov.uk/
-
Government Office for the East Midlands
http://www.go-em.gov.uk/
-
Government Office for the West Midlands (Inoperative)
http://www.go-wm.gov.uk/ (presumably)
-
Government Office for the East of England
http://www.go-east.gov.uk/
-
Government Office for the South East
http://www.go-se.gov.uk/
-
Government Office for the South West
http://www.gosw.gov.uk/
Local Government Act 2000
http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/20000022.htm
was interesting, but not useful in this context.