[Talk-GB] Traditional/Historic Counties

[Adam Snape]

Hi Colin,

Thanks for the reply and offer of assistance, and also thanks for your
administrative boundary gpx files which have been very useful for mapping
local parishes.

I was aware of the mapping of ceremonial counties but they're actually
based upon the post-1974 administrative counties with the inclusion of the
related unitary authorities ie. you have ceremonial counties such as
Merseyside and Greater Manchester. Yorkshire is split into four such
ceremonial counties and some of the Yorkshire Dales lie in the ceremonial
county of Cumbria.

Regarding time scale, most counties retained their traditional form until
the 1974 local government reforms. You're right that Yorkshire and Sussex
were exceptional in that their large size meant that much of the day to day
administration was devolved into subdivisions much earlier but they still
existed as whole entities until that date and i'd suggest that people still
identified with the 'county' rather than the administrative subdivision.

My view was that - like teh Irish Townlands project - there's still
a cultural relevance to these historical units and I thought it a good
potential use of boundary=historical, but if the consensus is that it's not
a good idea then that's fine.

Thanks again,

Adam








Hi Adam,

OSM does contain "Ceremonial Counties", i.e. Lieutenancy areas (in
England). They are mapped as boundary=ceremonial. Basically they
represent the counties as they existed just before the 1974 LGA. The
boundaries still change occasionally to keep pace with (minor) changes
to administrative boundaries, but that is done by separate legislative
changes which are enacted "in sync" with the admin boundary changes.

They have their own boundary relation in OSM unless they are not
coterminous with the administrative county. In those cases, sometimes
they do, and sometimes they don't have their own relation.

We don't need old OS maps for these boundaries as they are published as
part of the OS Boundary-Line data set.

However, if you mean "historical" in the sense of "really old", that's a
different discussion, about historical data - i.e. things that no longer
exist at all. Most people agree that OSM is not the right place to put
things that really don't exist any more. There have been nasty
discussions in the past about the trackbeds of abandoned railways...

You mentioned "Yorkshire" and "Sussex" - how far do you have to go back
to find these as single entities? We are talking hundreds of years...
But it would be very easy to create a new relation to combine East+West
Sussex and Brighton&Hove and call it "Sussex", but is that what you
mean? Does "Sussex" actually have sharp borders?

I do a lot of work with the UK admin boundaries in OSM - let me know if
I can help further.

//colin
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/attachments/20170209/ef807448/attachment-0001.html>