Welcome t'Map Men.
We're t'men
An' 'ere's t'map.
♫ Map Men, Map Men
♫ Map Map Map Men Men.
In today's programme we're going to talk about counties.
Counties are the building blocks that make up Britain.
The units you're expected to have heard of
to help place towns and villages you've not heard of
such as Wingerworth
- Where? - in Derbyshire.
Ohh.
Where's Derbyshire?
Arguably the county that inspires the fiercest pride and loyalty in its inhabitants is Yorkshire.
Yorkshire is known for Yorkshire puddings, Yorkshire terriers, and Yorkshire tea
which comes from this part of Yorkshire.
With its distinctive accent, strong identity, and intense one-way rivalry with Lancashire next door,
Yorkshire folk are proud to tell everyone they come across that they come from Yorkshire.
And they're all wrong to do so because Yorkshire doesn't exist.
Yes it does.
Alright, show me a map with Yorkshire on it.
Okay.
Here. This map of the 39 counties of England
clearly shows a county called Yorkshire.
But this map of the 48 counties of England
shows seperate North, South, West and East Riding Of Yorkshire
but no single county called Yorkshire.
But my map is correct and up-to-date.
So's mine.
And so's this one.
What's going on?
We're doing Map Men.
No, I mean with the counties?
Well...
The definition of 'county' in Britain is a minefield
of anomalies, asterisks, confusions, vague areas
and contradictory Wikipedia articles.
The more you look for answers about what a county really is
the more questions you come across.
Which is perhaps why no one's attempted to do a video about them before.
Even Google Docs won't let you type the word 'county'
without suggesting 'Did you mean "country"?'
But we're not taking citation needed for an answer.
It's time to do some actual research to find out once and for all
what is a county?
Aaaand... go!
♫ ♫ ♫
Right, now that we've eaten all those biscuits, shall we start doing some research?
I've done it all.
The first time England was split into what we now call counties was back in the 10th Century
when King Æthelstan wanted to make sure all the same laws were being obeyed
and all the same taxes were being collected all across England.
Which curiously is the opposite reason why you'd divide a nation up nowadays.
He split his kingdom into bitesize manageable chunks
and sent an earl to be in charge of each one of them.
How they got their names tells you a bit about how they were formed.
These were named after ethnic groups
or old kingdoms that existed before England.
These ones that end in 'sex'
tehehehehe
were part of the Saxon kingdoms that spread across the south of England.
and these ones took their name from the most important town - the county town
and added the Anglo-Saxon word 'shire' on the end
the same word that 'sheriff' comes from.
Sheer... sheer...iff... sherriff
Ooh!
And for our American viewers, it's pronounced "sheer", not "shyer".
Actually it's pronounced "sher", not "sheer", plebs!
Over the centuries, these areas have been controlled by
earls, dukes, sherriffs, lords, and at one point, counts
which is how they came to be known as count-ies.
The precise location of exactly where one county stopped and another one started
wasn't important in those days.
Nobody tried to draw the boundaries on a map until the 1080s when the Normans did a survey.
Hello Norman, I've done a survey of all the people who say they live in Worcestershire.
Thanks Norman, I'll just add that to my survey of all the people who say they live in Gloucestershire.
- Oh dear. - Oh dear.
And that's how the fuzzy county borders became sharp lines
but with lots of panhandles, detached areas, exclaves and squiggly bits.
England's counties varied massively in size.
The biggest, Yorkshire, was half the size of Wales
and the smallest, Rutland, was roughly the size of a whale
with zero cities and frankly had no business being a county.
Harsh.
But these differences didn't really matter, until...
In 1888, the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury established administrative counties,
making democracy local.
Each county would now have its own county council in the county town
in charge of local things like police, fire, council tax, and so on.
But some counties were too big to be easily manageable.
Sussex got split into east and west
and Yorkshire was split into its historic "Ridings"
a word that meant "thirds".
Third...ings... th'rdings... r'dings...
ridings... yeah, that sort of works.
In addition to this, big cities were given the status of County Borough
which made them independent from the county they were in
effectively taking the Leicester out of Leicestershire,
Derby out of Derbyshire, and Nottingham out of Nottinghamshire.
So does this all mean that a united Yorkshire hasn't existed since 1888?
Well, not exactly.
Strap in.
The new administrative counties did not replace the historic counties.
Both systems confusingly co-existed at the same time.
And the confusion was only going to get worse.
Lots of towns in Britain had the same name.
This often caused confusion with many people's letters being delivered to the wrong place.
Which is why from 18 something onwards,
the Royal Mail required that every address had to end with a county.
But!
Because many post towns happened to spread inconveniently across county borders,
the Royal Mail, for the own convenience, introduced the last thing Britain needed...
another counties map.
The post office's counties didn't match up with the historic ones or the administrative ones.
For example, the town of Ugley was in the county of Essex, but the address ended in Hertfordshire.
Which meant there were now three interpretations of what county you lived in:
historical, administrative, and/or postal.
As the centuries rolled on, the counties system went from being confusing
to being completely out of date.
After the Industrial Revolution, Britain's new big cities
were manspreading themselves across county borders.
And many county towns were no longer the commercial powerhouses they used to be.
The once mighty city of York had fallen to fifth place in non-existant Yorkshire.
The counties didn't reflect 20th century Britain in any cultural, practical, or meaning...
...ful sense.
It was time for a complete shake-up.
The year was 1972.
A time of optimism, and experimentation
and the first episode of Rainbow.
The Local Government Act of 1972 was a radical attempt at cleaning up
the complicated, outdated counties mess, both once and for all.
Brand new Metropolitan Counties sprang into existence
with modern sounding names like Merseyside, Greater Manchester,
West Midlands, and Tyne and Wear.
London of course wasn't included in any of this
as they'd already done their own thing ten years earlier
which Jay has previously discussed on a video he made without me.
At the same time, several traditional counties vanished overnight.
It was county carnage!
Huntingdonshire got eaten by Cambridgeshire.
Hereford got anded with Worcester.
Cumberland, Westmorland and this lump of Lancashire
were all merged and given the horrible new name
'Cumbria'.
And silly little Rutland was sensibly absorbed by Leicestershire.
Chances are, nobody would have battenburged an eyelid
at yet another change to Britain's local authorities.
But the Government made a big mistake.
They messed with Yorkshire.
Yorkshire's borders got a complete meddling,
creating a new South Yorkshire
which was cheeky.
But when the East Riding got taken out of Yorkshire altogether
and became part of the new 'Humberside',
that was not on.
It was off.
The previously Yorkshirean residents of Hull
were not at all keen to be lumped with Grimsby
on the other side of the River Humber.
It was a particularly bizarre union given the Humber Bridge connecting the two sides
hadn't even been built yet.
There was an anti-Humberside campaign
and even anti-Humberside graffiti.
All this kerfuffle forced the government's hand
and in 1996, Humberside quietly disappeared.
As did other unpopular experiments
like Cleveland, and Avon.
Hereford and Worcester once again became
Hereford and Worcester... shire.
Even ridiculous Rutland regained its status
as England's smallest county.
The shake-up of 1972 designed to simplify things
did nothing of the sort,
instead marking the beginning of an era
where county borders, names, and powers
have been changing on an ever-increasing basis.
England today has nine regions, comprising 47 ceremonial counties
alongside six metropolitan counties comprising 36 metropolitan districts,
26 non-metropolitan counties comprising 192 non-metropolitan districts
and 56 unitary authorities, not including Greater London which is a Ceremonial County, and not a county
comprising 32 boroughs and the City of London which is a district, and a county, and not a ceremonial county
and we haven't even talked about Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland where it's different.
Absolute state of this!
Although it may seem more impossible than ever
to tell what, and isn't a county
according to this particularly aggressive map publisher...
"It's very simple...
"our historic counties have never been affected, nor their boundaries changed
"by the endless shifting of local government boundaries over the past 100 years."
This is a view shared by the increasingly exasperated
Association of British Counties, who seek to...
"Give every county a county day"
"teach counties to schoolchildren"
"fly county flags in every county"
"stop using the word county for local authorities"
"who are not proper counties..."
Fruitcakes.
The reality is, unless you live in a county
that's particularly, unusually proud of itself, like Yorkshire,
in general, not much of a monkey's is given
about the county you live in.
And that might be because it just doesn't really matter.
It's not like the USA where laws vary from one state to the next.
Even Royal Mail doesn't care anymore.
Thanks to postcodes, putting a county on your address
has been unnecessary since 1996
despite the boxes they make you fill in on Amazon.
But just because they're not important doesn't mean we should forget about them.
Present-day knowledge and understanding of English counties
is in an abysmal state.
We stopped over four people on the street
and not a single one of them could faultlessly name
every single county in England and its county town.
Well we think that's a terrible shame.
And it's about time something was done about it.
♫ Ohhhhh....
♫ There's Leicestershire, Oxfordshire, Rutland and...
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Sir.
Sir who?
Surfshark is a VPN...
An app and browser extension that makes your internet safer
by masking your IP address, protecting you from trackers and hackers.
It has servers in more than 60 countries, which means you can bypass your country's internet restrictions
and experience a fully open global internet.
Sounds pretty. nerdy. Not for me thanks.
It's not nerdy.
Only nerds use acronyms like VPN.
Okay. I'll show you how it's useful without using any acronyms.
Let's say you're in a cafe
And you're using your laptop using the public WiFi
and you're trying to leave a comment on a YouTube video
but it won't let you because the WiFi is restricted...
WiFi is an acronym.
No it's not, that's a common misconception.
Oh.
Anyway, if you've got Surfshark, then in just two clicks you can turn Surfshark on.
and hey pesto, the internet's fully open like normal
and it's just as fast and reliable as before.
This genuinely happened to me in Starbucks.
and I was genuinely blown away by how easy it was.
But how do I actually get Surfshark if I'm not a nerd like you?
I assume it's on the dark web.
Nope. Just click the link in the description and get 83% off plus an extra 3 months for free
by using the code "mapmen".
Looks like there's a 30 day money-back guarantee.
which basically makes it a free trial.
So whether it's for country hopping, or making your internet safer
or bypassing restricted WiFi to leave YouTube comments in a cafe
Surfshark is really really good.
This Surfshark thing sounds easier and more up my street than I'd originally assumed.
And that's why you should get Surfshark ASAP.
Oops!
Acronym!
Aaargh!!
♫ Leicestershire, Oxfordshire, Rutland and Warwickshire
Northamptonshire is next door.
Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Lincolnshire
Huntingdonshire and there's more, Like...
Suffolk and Essex and Surrey and Sussex, And Nottinghamshire in the centre
Devon and Cornwall and Dorset and Somerset
Kent, and what comes after Kent? Er...
Westmorland, Cumberland also Northumberland
and County Durham below
There's Lancashire, Gloucestershire Derbyshire, Cheshire
Eleven more counties to go.
Shropshire and Staffordshire, Berkshire and Hampshire
and Herefordshire next to Wales
There's Hertfordshire, Middlesex Worcestershire, Wiltshire
and Yorkshire with all of the dales.
And Buckinghamshire's the end of the list, There's no need to sing any more
Cos we're not doing Scotland or Wales or new ones invented in 1974.