[Talk-GB] OT: Is Bristol the UK's only cross-border city?

[Philip Barnes]

The built up area of Chester straddles the England-Wales border and the football ground is right on the border. The pitch being in Wales and some of the car park and offices in England.

Phil

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On 13/06/2012 13:13 Colin Smale wrote:

Not directly OSM-related but I thought there might be someone here who knows...

It seems that the formal boundary of Bristol City Council includes a huge chunk of the Bristol Channel, from Avonmouth out to Steep Holm, across to Flat Holm and back again. This was confirmed in 2007 by the ceremony of "beating the bounds" (see [1]) in which the Mayor reasserts his territory by following the complete boundary. He got on a boat and went out to the islands. The islands themselves are not included in his patch. Flat Holm is an exclave of Cardiff City Council's area and Steep Holm belongs to North Somerset.

However the boundary between England and Wales runs approximately half-way between the two islands. I haven't found a definitive statement of where the border lies, but every map I have found on the internet shows it where it is in OSM. Therefore a triangular area of water exists which is on the Welsh side of the border but "owned" by an English authority. You can see this in [2].

So Bristol is a cross-border authority, unless the national border makes some kind of detour here.

It's a purely academic discussion of course (who cares about a few hectares of the Bristol Channel apart from the Mayor of Bristol), but does anyone know any more? Are there any other examples of this kind of border anomaly?

Colin

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/bristol/somerset/7019663.stm
[2] http://openmapsurfer.uni-hd.de/?zoom=12&lat=51.37133&lon=-3.09757&layers=00000BFFF



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