New York City is divided into five iconic boroughs.
Paris is divided into twenty unimaginatively named arrondissements.
And London too is divided into boroughs - 32 of them.
But why 32? Why not 4, or 703?
Why does London, or indeed any big city need to split itself up into bits?
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Greater London is [BEEP]ing enormous!
With a population about the same as an entire Switzerland, if it were run by just one council
it would be gargantuanly huge compared to the next biggest one in England.
A super council like this would be bureaucratic and inefficient
and there'd inevitably be whole neighbourhoods that get totally forgotten about.
Another reason to divide London up, is that it's not just big, it's diverse. From the touristy West End...
to the densely populated Victorian inner city...
to the leafy twentieth century suburbs...
different parts of the capital have different needs
and what they spend their money on is a local decision that should be decided locally.
That's why the city is split into several subservient subsections.
While London had been subdivided like this for centuries, it had never been subdivided very well.
Before 1965, the area we now call Greater London was made up of 86 authorities
based mostly on ancient church parishes, many dating back to the Middle Ages.
There's lots of evidence of the pre-1965 authorities you can still see today.
Walking around London, you may notice street signs that bear unfamiliar names
like "Borough of St Pancras"?
"Borough of Hampstead"? "Borough of Finsbury"? "Borough of Holborn"? "Borough of Paddington"?
Some of these old names survive today as parliamentary constituencies
and they also turn up in some unexpected places
such as St Marylebone Crematorium, which is nowhere near Marylebone
and St Pancras Cemetery which is nowhere near St Pancras.
These were named after the councils that built them and not their locations
which, in those days, were empty countryside.
The presence of the ex-boroughs can also be felt in some of the lovely town halls they left behind.
Lots of these Grade II listed buildings have been turned into things.
Battersea Town Hall is now Battersea Arts Centre
Hampstead Town Hall is now WAC Arts Centre.
Hornsey Town Hall is now Hornsey Town Hall Arts Centre
etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.
So what was wrong with these old boroughs, and why were they gotten ridded of?
Under the old system, in this small area of North Woolwich,
the primary school was run the the County Borough of East Ham,
the emergency services by the County Borough of West Ham,
the public baths and library by the Metropolitan Borough of Woolwich,
and the secondary school by the London County Council, all within a five minute walk of each other.
The 86 authorities varied massively in size and what powers they had.
There were too many of them and it was a cluttery mess.
And so, in the late fifties, it was decided to slim down from 86 to a more manageable number.
Suddenly, every authority in London was in danger of disappearing...
...except one.
Right in the middle of the map is the very small and very confusingly named City Of London.
This square mile on the site of Roman Londinium has always done things differently from the London that surrounds it.
To this day they have their own separate police force, separate taxes, and separate Lord Mayor.
The corporation that runs the City of London is so old, nobody knows how old it is.
The oldest document we can find is from around 12 something....
We could talk for hours about what makes the City of London weird.
Basically, due to its historical importance, the City was going to be left alone as it was
but the rest of London was getting a complete overhaul.
This is the first attempt at a new map drawn up in 1957 by the inventor of Greater London Sir Edwin Herbert.
with 52 new boroughs. So why wasn't it used?
When this map was shown to the man who had to approve the new boroughs,
Minister for Housing and Local Government Keith Sinjohn Joseph, he didn't like it for two reasons.
- I don't like it for two reasons.
1. These suburban fringes aren't going to be part of London after all,
and B, these boroughs are still too small.
A proper borough should function like a city in its own right.
It should have a natural centre for shops and services,
good unbroken lines of communication like roads and rail,
and a population no smaller than 200,000 - a tried and tested size for an efficient council.
And so began the task of creating the new, bigger, more powerful boroughs, each one more equal than the last.
- This would be achieved by merging the old 86 authorities together in new combinations.
Some neighbours were happy to dutifully partner up.
But some authorities, actually most of them, were not feeling cooperative,
making the puzzle much tricker to solve.
Bitter long-term rivals East Ham and West Ham were furious about being made to merge.
Hornsey was begging for an up-down alliance with lovely Southgate rather than a side-to-side one with smelly Tottenham.
Woolwich was refusing to give up its weird little enclaves north of the river Thames,
a map anomaly dating back to William the Conqueror,
But this was precisely the sort of silliness getting rid of this entire exercise was the point of.
Wandsworth argued that it already met the criteria to carry on as a borough on its own, and it did.
But what would then have happened to little Battersea?
It couldn't join the surrounding Wandsworth, or the new combined borough would be too big.
The only solution was to slice the old Wandsworth in two.
Fights like this were happening in every corner of the capital.
But arguably, Keith's most controversial combination was here in north west London.
Wembley was a mostly home-owning, mostly Tory voting leafy suburb.
Willesden was a mostly renting, mostly Labour voting urban neighbourhood.
As well as being nothing alike, the two sides were isolated from each other.
There were only two small roads connecting them.
Keith was inundated with angry letters from both sides opposing the merger
but since all the surrounding boroughs had been solved really nicely
and he was in no mood to start all over again
the improbable and impractical shotgun marriage between Wembley and Willesden had to go ahead.
There was no way to give all 86 authorities what they wanted, but of the thousands of potential solutions,
Keith calculated that the pattern to make the fewest people unhappy was... this one.
The answer to the question "How many boroughs should Greater London have?" was 32.
In the end, Keith did rather a neat job.
But the fighting was far from finished; the 32 new boroughs now needed names.
Rather than cause any more arguments, Keith let the new boroughs come up with their own suggestions for what they should be called.
But they came back with some really stupid names like...
'Ossulton Gore', 'Sorenson Spread', 'Chiglewanwood', 'Thirty Two',
and three of them wanted to be called 'Riverside' including one not on the river.
- If they want to be trusted to come up with their own names they have to stick to these rules:
A. Give clear indication of location. It's got to be somewhere people have heard of.
2. No silly, made up words. And most important of all...
4. Absolutely no double barrelled or unwieldy long names.
Under these new rules, most boroughs chose one of their existing names.
In most cases it was obvious which one was most deserving - especially Harrow.
Usually the honour went to the borough with the biggest population
but sometimes it went instead to the borough considered to be the "most historically significant"
and yes, this did cause massive arguments.
It was bad enough being conquered by your neighbour, but imagine having to take their name as well.
That's like telling the people of Scotland "You're called England now" except nowhere near as big a deal.
If councils couldn't agree on an existing name
they either had to come up with a neutral compromise, or have a neutral compromise imposed upon them.
East Ham and West Ham put it to local residents to pick a new name
which predictably resulted in the suggestions 'Hamstrung', 'Ham Sandwich' and 'Ham Sweet Ham'.
The councils ignored these and became 'New Ham'... or 'Newham'.
The rest of the new solutions however, were nowhere near as inspired, and nearly all broke rule A.
Before 1965, hardly anyone was familiar with the ancient names of...
'Havering', 'Tower Hamlets', or 'Hillingdon' which was only chosen
because the grandfather of one of the civil servants was a rector of the tiny parish with that name.
More lowlights include 'Redbridge' named after a red bridge demolished in 1921 that no one remembers,
the dully monosyllabic 'Brent'
a poor choice given that a Brent tube station already existed, and wasn't in Brent
and, in my opinion, the worst one, 'Haringey'
named after a small neighbourhood at the southern tip of the borough
but with one of the 'R's removed and one of the 'A's turned into an 'E'.
The two spellings have been confusing Londoners ever since.
The 32 names had nearly all been agreed
when Keith received a letter from the influential and very important Captain John Lichfield
Member of Parliament for Chelsea.
The letter said...
(cockney thug voice) You'd better not forget the name Chelsea when you name our new borough
Or I'm gonna come round there and I'm gonna... fffnnnnwwweeeeooohh, I'm gonna....
woooashnffhmmfwwweerr..... (trails off)
- But I already promised the Royal Borough of Kensington they could keep their name!
- he said. What could he do?
To save his own skin, he let both sides have their way, producing the absurd, dodecasyllabic
"The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea".
Keith's own rules made it very clear that this sort of name wasn't allowed
and it was quite an insult to the much larger groups of people who'd campaigned hard for "and Deptford"
and "and Battersea". As usual, it was one rule for the very posh who get taken seriously when they complain,
and another rule for everyone else.
After decades of pressure, the ministry relaxed the ban on "and"
in 1979 when Hammersmith gained an "and Fulham" and in 1980 when Barking gained an "and Dagenham".
And that's how we got the 32 boroughs with the 32 names that we're still using today.
But that's only half the story!
How are the London boroughs run today? How is life different from one borough to the next?
How can you tell when you've crossed a border from one to th'other? And which borough has the best logo?
Find out all of this and less in part 2.
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