[Talk-GB] Village, Hamlet and populations ...

[Mark Goodge]

On 14/09/2015 00:41, Tom Hughes wrote:
> On 14/09/15 00:16, Lester Caine wrote:
>
>> The OSM wiki defines 'hamlet' as less than 100-200 people, but village
>> supposedly starts at 1000 up to 10000 with the proviso that it depends
>> on the country. Ideally the two would perhaps meet :) We are perhaps
>> looking at a population of around 8000 for a town designation in the UK,
>> but anything down to 100 is still classified as a village by the ONS.
>> What are actually missing from the OSN data are ANY hamlets despite
>> their claiming to include them.
>
> Please don't try and draw bright lines based on population, and
> certainly don't try and mass edit things based on that. It's much more
> subjective than that.
>
> Nobody would ever have described the place where I grew up as anything
> other than a town, but we always used to reckon on a population of
> around 3000 people (wikipedia says 5627 as of the 2011 census) and
> certainly 8000 sounds very high to me.

Historically, the distinction between a hamlet, a village and a town was 
based on ecclesiastical parishes. A village was a populated area 
comprising a parish of its own, with one parish church. A town was a 
contiguous populated area comprising multiple ecclesiastical parishes, 
while a hamlet was a populated area too small to have its own parish 
(and thus being contained within another one, either a village parish or 
an outlying area of a town parish).

This official distinction has been lost over the years with multiple 
phases of local government reorganisation, but it still provides a good 
rule of thumb.

In England and Wales, a civil parish council can choose to style itself 
a town council if it wishes. The majority of those which have done so 
are those which, prior to the Local Government Act 1972, would have been 
a Municipal Borough (eg, Evesham or Lewes) and which meet the historical 
definition of a town, but by no means all of them fall into this category.

What that means is that population alone is a no more than a rough guide 
to the likely status of a town or village, at least in England and 
Wales. There's a significant overlap between the largest villages and 
the smallest towns.

Mark
-- 
http://www.markgoodge.com