Random UK County

How this random UK county generator works

Press Generate and you get an English ceremonial county. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them.

Bedfordshire. Cornwall. Rutland. Tyne and Wear. The Isles of Scilly. Greater London. Bristol.

Look at that sequence. An ancient shire, a duchy, a county that was abolished, a name invented in the 1970s, an archipelago, a capital, and a city. All seven are counties. Knowing which kind is the difference between a right answer and a plausible one.

England has three answers, and all of them are official

Ask how many counties England has. There is no single correct number, and this is not because nobody has bothered to decide. It is because the country decided three times, for three different purposes, and never repealed the earlier answers.

• 48 ceremonial counties. Defined by the Lieutenancies Act 1997. These are the areas to which the monarch appoints a Lord-Lieutenant. Their boundaries have not changed since 1998.
• 84 metropolitan and non-metropolitan counties. The local government counties, created by the Local Government Act 1972 and repeatedly reorganised since.
• 39 historic counties. The ancient shires, mostly formed before the tenth century. They have had no role in local government since 1974. They still organise cricket.

All three are current. All three are used. A place can be in Gloucestershire for one purpose and South Gloucestershire for another, and be in a third county on a cricket scorecard.

This is not sloppiness. Each set answers a different question. The ceremonial county answers "who represents the Crown here". The local government county answers "who empties the bins". The historic county answers "where am I from".

The ceremonial forty-eight

The ceremonial set is the strangest of the three, and you can see its strangeness in its contents.

Bristol is a county. Bristol is a city. It has its own Lord-Lieutenant, and it is not a historic county at all.

Greater London is a county, or rather two: for lieutenancy purposes it is deemed to be the City of London and everything else. It is not a county in local government law.

The Isles of Scilly are a county. They lie outside the entire 1972 local government system.

Tyne and Wear, West Midlands and Merseyside are counties. They were invented in 1974. Their county councils were abolished in 1986. The counties remained, with no council and no function beyond representing the Crown.

So: a county with no council, a city that is a county, an archipelago outside the system, and a name invented within living memory. That is the ceremonial list, and it is the right one to use if you want to cover England exactly once with no gaps and no overlaps.

Rutland stopped existing for twenty-three years

Rutland is England's smallest county. It very nearly is not a county at all.

On 1 April 1974, the Local Government Act 1972 abolished it. Rutland was judged too small to function and was made a district of Leicestershire. Cumberland, Westmorland, Huntingdonshire and Worcestershire went the same way.

On 1 April 1997, Rutland was re-established.

Twenty-three years in which the county did not exist as a county, and then it came back, and it is now both a unitary authority and its own ceremonial county with its own Lord-Lieutenant.

Meanwhile the counties invented to replace the old ones, Avon and Cleveland and Humberside, were abolished in 1996 after twenty-two years. Their names live on only in the police forces.

The map is not the land. The map is a set of decisions, and the decisions get reversed.

The other forty-eight, which Royal Mail abolished

Here is a coincidence that has confused a great many people.

For the purpose of sorting mail, England was also divided into 48 postal counties. A different 48. Royal Mail had been unable to keep up with the boundary reforms of 1965 and 1974, partly on the grounds that changing them would have meant changing every address in the country.

In 1996 Royal Mail stopped requiring them. Postcodes had made them unnecessary. In 2000 they were moved out of the address database entirely and into an alias file, kept only so that older software would not fall over.

This is why people still write Middlesex on envelopes. Middlesex ceased to be a county in 1965. Most of it is Greater London. It has no Lord-Lieutenant and no council. It survives as a historic county, a cricket club, and a habit.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland count differently

The word "county" does not travel across the United Kingdom's internal borders intact.

Wales has 22 principal areas for local government, and a separate set of preserved counties used for lieutenancy, which is the same trick England plays with a different vocabulary.

Northern Ireland has six traditional counties, which were replaced for administrative purposes by districts, and which everybody still uses conversationally and nobody uses officially.

Scotland has council areas, registration counties, and lieutenancy areas, and the three do not align.

Counted broadly across the whole United Kingdom, over time and by purpose, there are something like 184 things that have at some point been called counties.

Which is why "how many counties are there" is a question with a country attached, a century attached, and a purpose attached, before it can have a number attached.

Ways people actually use this

• Address forms and test data. The ceremonial set is the safest single list, because it covers England exactly once with no gaps and no overlaps.
• Quizzes. Show the county, ask for the county town. Then ask whether it has a county council. Several do not.
• Teaching. The cleanest example anywhere of a country holding three official answers to one question, on purpose.
• Writing. English fiction is soaked in county identity, and the counties in it are usually the historic ones.
• Arguments. Somebody at your table believes Yorkshire is a county. Somebody else believes it is four.

Getting more out of the filters

• Type shire into Contains and look at what does not come back. Kent, Essex, Sussex, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cornwall and Devon carry names older than the shire system itself.
• Type Yorkshire for the counties that England's largest historic county was cut into.
• Type Greater, West or and to find the twentieth-century inventions. Tyne and Wear is named after two rivers, which is what you do when the county itself is new.
• Starts with and Ends with compare a single character, so pass one letter, not a word.

Questions people ask

How many counties does England have?

Three answers, all correct. 48 ceremonial counties for lieutenancy, 84 metropolitan and non-metropolitan counties for local government, and 39 historic counties.

What is a ceremonial county?

An area to which the monarch appoints a Lord-Lieutenant, defined by the Lieutenancies Act 1997. The term does not appear in the legislation itself, which calls them counties for the purposes of the Act.

Was Rutland abolished?

Yes, on 1 April 1974, when it became a district of Leicestershire. It was re-established as a unitary authority and its own ceremonial county on 1 April 1997.

Does Middlesex still exist?

Not as a county. The office of Lord-Lieutenant of Middlesex was abolished in 1965 and most of its area became Greater London. It survives as a historic county, a cricket club, and a habit in addresses.

What happened to postal counties?

Royal Mail stopped requiring them in 1996 and removed them from its address database in 2000, keeping them only in an alias file so that older software would still work. Postcodes had made them redundant.

References

1. Ceremonial counties of England
2. Counties of England
3. List of counties of the United Kingdom