TOPOGRAPHY: Bristol, an exchange
With Cllr Nick Wallis
Our local government correspondent, Dr Noel Lackland, in the course of a discussion of the telluric qualities of contemporary county governance, made some contentious remarks about the City of Bristol. We are happy to publish the following exchange in an effort to clarify this important question.
Cllr Nick Wallis: I have recently read your stimulating piece regarding the county map of England.
Forgive me if thousands of irate Bristolians have already contacted you, but Bristol was a City and County prior to reorganisation. Granted this status by a hard-up Edward III in 1373 in return for 600 marks, it was a badge felt keenly by Bristolians up to and after Walker's reforms which ushered in Avon. Although now in self-imposed exile in the northeast, I have been somewhat surprised that the City Council hasn't made more of the return of its old titles in its promotional literature since gaining unitary status — after all, most county boroughs, such as Darlington where I am, were denied the return of their old title. Perhaps this underlines the extent to which people have moved on, and are prepared to consider new models which better reflect current economic realities.
What the current patchwork of historic 'counties' and administrative arrangements has to offer the 21st century is anyone's guess. Personally, I favour the regional model, with a tier of all-purpose unitaries underneath, but I suspect that we may disagree on this point . . .
Dr Lackland replies: How amazing! How simply marvellous, my entire life’s work has not yet been in vain! A councillor, a councillor sound enough to read ERO and, moreover, to read it in a constructive frame of mind. Doesn’t it just make you think that there is hope for real Toryism in local government still? As did I, to the point of drafting the following paragraph in my response:
“It is encouraging to find that an organ as consistently conservative as ERO is being read by at least one Tory Councillor. Much as you are correct to assume that I wholly disagree with your views on regional government, you are clearly in general that rarest of creatures: a ‘Tory Councillor’ who thinks like a Tory (read that carefully and you will find not one but two gifts which distinguish you from most of your colleagues). I look forward to the day when Darlington's citizens elect a Tory council to do Tory things and, unlike just about everywhere else where voters have been so deluded, they actually get their wish beyond polling day.”
If you did think this, forget it. The above paragraph must be lost to eternity. Having done my homework, I discover from the Darlington Council website that Mr. Wallis is a Labour councillor, a Labour councillor (sorry, I’m having a mild Kinnock moment). I should have guessed he could never be a Tory councillor really, his views on regional government apart, obviously.
In fairness I have to say many thanks to Cllr Wallis for his thoughtful observations on my article. I was most gratified to receive them; after too many years, thankfully now behind me, in which the only audience for this aspect of my research was made up of disinterested youths, who had only chosen the course because they didn't know what else to do or couldn't do it anyway (one memorable gamma minus told me that he mistakenly signed up because he liked cars and thought a Council was an old Ford model), it is nice to find someone genuinely enthused by my work.
I must continue with an apology to you and all other Bristolians (though sadly, they have not come forward in their irate thousands and, as the enthusiasm of my opening remarks suggests, you remain the sum total of my declared readership, despite the obvious appeal of my subject matter), who perhaps took my confession that I ‘have some difficulty describing Bristol as a county in any sense’ as a slight upon their fair city, nay, county. If so, it was entirely unmeant. Bristol is one of England's great cities, with a magnificent heritage in both culture and science.
You are right to say that Bristol was indeed one of our county boroughs, a status which you are equally right to say was fiercely cherished by the citizens of such places and which, once established, was apparently beyond molestation at the hands of all monarchs but not so at the hands of the Rt Hon Peter Walker MP, Secretary of State for the Environment 1970-74 (mark that down, all students of my latest module: “Long Forgotten, Third Rate, Nonentities, Who Nonetheless Managed To Leave Deeply Destructive Legacies, 1951-1979)”, who abolished all eighteen of the county boroughs in his Great Leap Forward.
However — and probably this will merely demonstrate the intractability of the original question, ‘what is a county?’ — I would strongly contend that county borough status did not make Bristol a county.
County boroughs, sometimes called “counties corporate”, were basically islands of judicial self-administration within their respective wider counties. When the county councils came along in 1889, this administrative distinction was extended to local government, making the county boroughs in effect the original unitary authorities. For example, in the same way the two-tier system operates today, education was the responsibility of county councils everywhere except within the boundaries of the county boroughs, which had their own education boards.
What the county boroughs did not have was their own Lord Lieutenant. Just as, today, those living within the administrative boundaries of Darlington's unitary authority come within the ceremonial boundaries of the Lieutenancy of County Durham, so, before 1974, did the residents of the old County Borough of Darlington. In Bristol’s case, its old county borough fell within the boundaries of the Lieutenancy of Gloucestershire, whither, I continue to maintain, the city should have returned after the break-up of Avon. In fact, of course, it should never have been taken out of those ceremonial boundaries by Walker in the first place.
The Association of British Counties is the guardian of and fount of all knowledge on our island's traditional counties. Its website tackles the question of the counties corporate thus:
The “county corporate” status has generally been seen as an extra dignity added to a town and has not usually been taken to mean that the town has literally been removed from its host County. For example, the General Register Office, within its Census Reports, never considered them to be so and always dealt with them as being part of the County in which they geographically lay. Numerous legal judgements found that the “counties corporate” were not ‘counties in the ordinary sense of the term’.
In postal terms, pre-1974 Bristol was considered part of Gloucestershire. The Association of British Counties website, with its marvellous database of traditional postal addresses, certainly advises so.
In sporting terms, Bristol was part of Gloucestershire up to 1974 and has continued to be so beyond. Gloucestershire County Cricket Club is based at the County Ground, Bristol, to this day.
But if we are to use ceremonial county boundaries, based on the Lord Lieutenants, as our most reliable compass through the Parsnip Field today — and UKLGI's observations on that method is what set this whole ball rolling in the first place — then Bristol is a county today, but it was never so before the late 1990s.
What is a county, indeed? Ultimately, Nick, your guess is probably as good as mine.
Noel Lackland, February 25, 2003 02:38 PM