ilerda
Conservative
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Post by ilerda on Jun 10, 2022 9:40:08 GMT
East Retford Rural District shared its offices with the East Retford Municipal Borough, with both based at Retford Town Hall. Worksop MB and Worksop RD also had the same arrangement. As pl says this was quite common. The boundaries are from Vision of Britain and are supposed to be those in place as of the 1971 census. As there are so many small councils there may be some errors. It's a beautiful map. Do you happen to have a blank version of it without the party colours?
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The Bishop
Labour
Down With Factionalism!
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Post by The Bishop on Jun 10, 2022 10:33:29 GMT
The large number of non-party councils is of course immediately obvious. Of the party controlled ones, Southampton being Tory and Eastleigh Labour rather stands out.
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Post by π΄ββ οΈ Neath West π΄ββ οΈ on Jun 10, 2022 10:54:20 GMT
The boundaries for Croydon are wrong on that map. How come there are so many tiny areas? Did some of the old district councils have multiple exclaves, like "boroughs of" somewhere? There are actually a couple of things that went wrong here that resulted in ridiculously small districts. The original system of Poor Law Unions (and co-terminous Registration Districts) was a good one: it resulted in districts that were big enough to sustain a workhouse. Two things went wrong with this: 1) A number of 19th century Whiggish acts that resulted in splitting off often very small urban districts: a) The Municipal Corporations Act, 1835. This was the least wrong-headed of these acts (its main defect was failing to address the City of London). This reformed 178 municipal boroughs and enabled a further 62 to gain this status over the next half century. b) The Public Health Act, 1848. This enabled any city, town, borough, or parish with a population of 30 (yes, thirty) to form a local board of health. The General Board of Health set up by this act could also set up local boards of health of its own accord in places with a death rate of at least 2.3%. This was then tinkered with by the Local Government Act, 1858, which dropped the "of health" bit from local boards, abolished the death rate bit, and styled the areas as local government districts. This mad system resulted in a ridiculous number of tiny local government districts: there were 721 of them by the time the Public Health Act, 1872, tried to tidy up this mess and merged some of them. c) The Public Health Act, 1872. Despite being in part an attempt to address the local government district madness, this actually entrenched the urban-rural split. It constituted the local government districts and municipal boroughs as urban sanitary districts, then made the remaining areas of poor law unions into rural sanitary districts. 2) Then both parties colluded to create some very small rural districts: a) The Local Government Act, 1888. This set up county councils without regard to whether their boundaries crossed district boundaries. This was the sole Tory contribution to the otherwise Liberal mess. b) The Local Government Act, 1894. The sensible bit of this was dropping "sanitary" from urban and rural districts' names. Rural districts also gained councils here. But then the most genius bit of Liberal madness dropped: where rural districts crossed county boundaries, they would try and split them into two (or more) rural districts! There were transitional provisions for the odd parish to be administered by a rural district in another county (which continued until 1955 in the case of Pennal, Meirionnydd, being administered by Machynlleth Rural District). There was a particularly wrong-headed attempt to sort all this out in the form of the Local Government Act, 1929. This had three main flaws: 1) It excluded municipal boroughs; so some absolutely ludicrously tiny boroughs continued through until 1974 (Cowbridge springs to mind). 2) It wasn't allowed to fix county boundaries. So it generally followed a pattern of taking the tiny rural districts that ought to have been in neighbouring counties and merging them into amorphous blobs. 3) It was applied half-heartedly (I mean, honestly, how did Llanwrtyd survive?). It's really a stunning display of 19th-century Liberal braindeadness that they didn't vest the public health powers in the poor law guardians. If they'd only done that, we would have ended up with sensible district councils.
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Post by jm on Jun 10, 2022 10:59:44 GMT
East Retford Rural District shared its offices with the East Retford Municipal Borough, with both based at Retford Town Hall. Worksop MB and Worksop RD also had the same arrangement. As pl says this was quite common. The boundaries are from Vision of Britain and are supposed to be those in place as of the 1971 census. As there are so many small councils there may be some errors. It's a beautiful map. Do you happen to have a blank version of it without the party colours? Here you are
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Post by jm on Jun 10, 2022 11:12:50 GMT
This discussion has given me an idea. What might the map look like if the Local Government Act 1972 had never happened and the pre-1974 councils were still in existence? coming soon.
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johng
Labour
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Post by johng on Jun 10, 2022 11:51:04 GMT
Rural and Urban Districts exercised broadly the same functions as non-metropolitan districts do today, namely council housing, planning, rates collection, public health etc. In 1971 the smallest Rural District by population was Masham (pop. 1,471) and the largest was Meriden (pop. 102,547) The smallest County Borough (equivalent to a modern-day unitary authority) was Canterbury with a population of just 33,000 Obviously England only.
There were multiple districts in Wales (both UDC and RDC) with a population below 1,000 in 1971. Edit: I need to make a correction here. No RDC in Wales had a population under 1,000 in 1971, though several UDCs did. The least populated RDC was Painscastle RD in Radnorshire which had a population of 1,410. Still smaller than Masham though.
As I said above, Llanwrtyd UDC had a population of 405 and that number had been continuously dropping for decades. I would also love to know how areas like Llanwrtyd operated at the time. It was surrounded by Builth RD which, I imagine (perhaps wrongly), focused on Builth Wells UD rather than Llanwrtyd as its main town and partner.
Archive.org has decades of Llanwrtyd UDC Medical Officer reports. They include really interesting tidbits. For most of the early period covered (pre-war), ambulance service was provided by Merthyr BC and St John's Ambulance, and the UDC had agreements with various hospitals around South Wales. From the 1958 report, a new part-time health inspector was appointed (incidentally also the inspector of the neighbouring Built RDC). We can see the public health inspector made 19 visits to shops, 5 to licensed premises and 4 to the district's 9 factories. 6 pounds of corned beef was condemned and destroyed. 12 premises were treated for rodents and no incidents of bed bugs were found or treated. There were 8 cases of measles and 6 of scarlet fever - all treated at home. Refuse was collected twice weekly by the UDC's contractor. Venereal diseases were the responsibility of the county council. The council had no committees and everything was dealt with as a full council.
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ilerda
Conservative
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Post by ilerda on Jun 10, 2022 12:13:28 GMT
It's really a stunning display of 19th-century Liberal braindeadness that they didn't vest the public health powers in the poor law guardians. If they'd only done that, we would have ended up with sensible district councils. I've never actually looked at the boundaries of the PLUs before, but from the maps on Vision of Britain and the parish lists from Wikipedia they do actually seem to make a lot of sense. It would have caused quite so disruption to the traditional county boundaries, but if the new PLU-based districts were allocated based on the traditional county of their namesake then it wouldn't have been too problematic in terms of administration. And with any luck they might have been able to survive and not require the 1974 cull provided the boundaries were updated every so often.
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Post by alexrichards on Jun 10, 2022 12:49:09 GMT
Council control in England & Wales following the 1972 local elections. Grey areas - Independent controlled/Non-political Black areas - No overall control Have Rallings and Thrasher released their compilation then? There's going to be a lot more districts which were actually in Partisan control than that- South East Derbyshire RDC for example was NOC with 9 Independents, 4 Conservatives (forming the administration) and 9 Labour- and that was an increase in Independents from previous years.
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Post by michaelarden on Jun 10, 2022 13:00:31 GMT
The large number of non-party councils is of course immediately obvious. Of the party controlled ones, Southampton being Tory and Eastleigh Labour rather stands out. And Liverpool being Tory too.
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Post by islington on Jun 10, 2022 13:17:23 GMT
The boundaries for Croydon are wrong on that map. How come there are so many tiny areas? Did some of the old district councils have multiple exclaves, like "boroughs of" somewhere? There are actually a couple of things that went wrong here that resulted in ridiculously small districts. The original system of Poor Law Unions (and co-terminous Registration Districts) was a good one: it resulted in districts that were big enough to sustain a workhouse. Two things went wrong with this: 1) A number of 19th century Whiggish acts that resulted in splitting off often very small urban districts: a) The Municipal Corporations Act, 1835. This was the least wrong-headed of these acts (its main defect was failing to address the City of London). This reformed 178 municipal boroughs and enabled a further 62 to gain this status over the next half century. b) The Public Health Act, 1848. This enabled any city, town, borough, or parish with a population of 30 (yes, thirty) to form a local board of health. The General Board of Health set up by this act could also set up local boards of health of its own accord in places with a death rate of at least 2.3%. This was then tinkered with by the Local Government Act, 1858, which dropped the "of health" bit from local boards, abolished the death rate bit, and styled the areas as local government districts. This mad system resulted in a ridiculous number of tiny local government districts: there were 721 of them by the time the Public Health Act, 1872, tried to tidy up this mess and merged some of them. c) The Public Health Act, 1872. Despite being in part an attempt to address the local government district madness, this actually entrenched the urban-rural split. It constituted the local government districts and municipal boroughs as urban sanitary districts, then made the remaining areas of poor law unions into rural sanitary districts. 2) Then both parties colluded to create some very small rural districts: a) The Local Government Act, 1888. This set up county councils without regard to whether their boundaries crossed district boundaries. This was the sole Tory contribution to the otherwise Liberal mess. b) The Local Government Act, 1894. The sensible bit of this was dropping "sanitary" from urban and rural districts' names. Rural districts also gained councils here. But then the most genius bit of Liberal madness dropped: where rural districts crossed county boundaries, they would try and split them into two (or more) rural districts! There were transitional provisions for the odd parish to be administered by a rural district in another county (which continued until 1955 in the case of Pennal, Meirionnydd, being administered by Machynlleth Rural District). There was a particularly wrong-headed attempt to sort all this out in the form of the Local Government Act, 1929. This had three main flaws: 1) It excluded municipal boroughs; so some absolutely ludicrously tiny boroughs continued through until 1974 (Cowbridge springs to mind). 2) It wasn't allowed to fix county boundaries. So it generally followed a pattern of taking the tiny rural districts that ought to have been in neighbouring counties and merging them into amorphous blobs. 3) It was applied half-heartedly (I mean, honestly, how did Llanwrtyd survive?). It's really a stunning display of 19th-century Liberal braindeadness that they didn't vest the public health powers in the poor law guardians. If they'd only done that, we would have ended up with sensible district councils. I have some sympathy with this, although I'd be much more positive about the 1835 Act. It did a lot to modernize English local government, at least in large towns. It was certainly a lot better than implied by the phrase 'least wrong-headed'.
My main problem with the PLUs is that they cut freely across traditional county boundaries. So long as they were only PLUs, the probably didn't matter so much but over time, they transformed into registration districts and rural (sanitary) districts. So this stored up a problem that crystallized when proper county government, with an elected council, was enacted in 1888. It was inconceivable that this important reform would be based on anything other than counties as traditionally understood, so inevitably various rural districts found themselves messily spread across two or more counties. It took years of incremental change to rectify this. With hindsight, it would have been better to draw the PLUs to respect existing county boundaries. Essentially, where I differ from π΄ββ οΈ Neath West π΄ββ οΈ is that I don't think it was the county boundaries that needed to be 'fixed' (apart from the removal of obvious anomalies as in the 1844 Act).
This doesn't mean that I've suddenly become a traditional county zealot, just that I recognize that in 19th-century England the traditional county was fundamental to people's sense of place in a way that PLU boundaries could never be. I agree that if you were drawing boundaries from scratch, the PLUs made more sense - but you weren't, you had a centuries-old county-based tradition firmly embedded, it was unwise to ignore it.
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Post by johnloony on Jun 10, 2022 14:32:18 GMT
If members of Parliament in the early 19th century had attained the correct level of consciousness, they would have realised that the main purpose of the existence of these hundreds of local authorities is to provide data in the form of election results. In the event of unopposed nominations, there would have been a law making it compulsory to have a contested election between the two main parties, even if itβs only party labels without any candidates.
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Post by yellowperil on Jun 10, 2022 15:44:59 GMT
I think the map may give the impression of rather more separate units than was actually the case, because on the scale it is being shown here it is not always clear from all the wiggles what constitutes a separate authority. Take Ashford, for instance, as I was around and aware of all those units in 1972,and for much of the preceding decade. There were 5 units in what is now Ashford Borough- the municipal borough of Tenterden, the UDC of Ashford, and the three RDCs of West Ashford, East Ashford , and Tenterden. 4 of these were non party, the UDC is shown as no overall control- in fact there were a mix of Con, Lab,Lib and independent councillors there, and that's where I would have been voting, in a bit overwhelmingly Liberal. But the map, especially the Tenterden borough/RDC boundaries are sufficiently complex at the scale shown it might well appear that there are at least a couple more mini-councils.
I am also aware that the RDCs were quite popular and sadly missed in some quarters when they departed, and I am very aware of the impact of the housing policies especially of WARDC, and the massive significance, for good or ill, of the council house building in all the WARDC villages. In many of them the WARDC houses were a substantial part of the village and its built environment- in my own village of Pluckley about a quarter of all the houses in the village in 5 separate estates, plus a load of former farm cottages taken over by the council and upgraded. I guess in a number of the neighbouring villages the share was much greater, and of course ex-council houses now are highly sought after in the post RTB age. There are quite a few million pound ex council houses around in the RDC areas.
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Post by π΄ββ οΈ Neath West π΄ββ οΈ on Jun 10, 2022 16:01:31 GMT
It's really a stunning display of 19th-century Liberal braindeadness that they didn't vest the public health powers in the poor law guardians. If they'd only done that, we would have ended up with sensible district councils. I've never actually looked at the boundaries of the PLUs before, but from the maps on Vision of Britain and the parish lists from Wikipedia they do actually seem to make a lot of sense. It would have caused quite so disruption to the traditional county boundaries, but if the new PLU-based districts were allocated based on the traditional county of their namesake then it wouldn't have been too problematic in terms of administration. And with any luck they might have been able to survive and not require the 1974 cull provided the boundaries were updated every so often. The Census actually did that for several decades. The reports were organised by Registration Counties β i.e. the county in which the Registration District's workhouse was in. In practice these mostly look sane if you can find a map of them (although it really emphasises how unworkable several of the Welsh counties were). Edit: I see someone has done a map of these over on Wikipedia.
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ColinJ
Labour
Living in the Past
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Post by ColinJ on Jun 10, 2022 16:21:45 GMT
An undeniably 'pretty' map that I have just acquired at a very reasonable price on ebay. It shows the ward boundaries of the Municipal Borough of Barking. I suspect from its age that it is pre-WW2 so probably shows the borough shortly after incorporation in 1931. Starting in the top left pink ward, and proceeding clockwise, the wards are: 1. Park (pink) 2. Longbridge (orange) 3. Manor (mauve) 4. Parsloes (green) 5. Cambell (orange) 6. Eastbury (blue) 7. Gascoigne (yellow) 8. Abbey (green) I suspect that the (undated) ward map shown in wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_Borough_of_Barking , is from a later period. Comparing the two, the first five wards have the same boundaries, but the last three wards - Eastbury, Gascoigne and Abbey - have clearly undergone extensive redrawing by the time of the wikipedia map.
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Post by Pete Whitehead on Jun 10, 2022 16:51:01 GMT
This discussion has given me an idea. What might the map look like if the Local Government Act 1972 had never happened and the pre-1974 councils were still in existence? coming soon. Here's Hertfordshire for you I should clarify (maybe) that grey here is NOC rather than Independent. The Conservatives lost three councils this May: Royston UDC to NOC and Harpenden UDC and St Albans RDC outright to the Lib Dems
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iain
Lib Dem
Posts: 10,708
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Post by iain on Jun 11, 2022 0:59:02 GMT
Pete Whitehead surely the 'Abbots Langley' district (unsure what it was actually called) would be Lib Dem?
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Post by bjornhattan on Jun 11, 2022 2:25:40 GMT
Pete Whitehead surely the 'Abbots Langley' district (unsure what it was actually called) would be Lib Dem? Isn't that the aforementioned Watford Rural District, which had three separate parts? Looking at the election results, the Lib Dem strength in Abbots Langley and Leavesden is counterbalanced by South Oxhey, Carpenders Park, and Aldenham/Radlett - the former being Labour and the latter two Conservative.
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Post by Pete Whitehead on Jun 11, 2022 4:56:15 GMT
Pete Whitehead surely the 'Abbots Langley' district (unsure what it was actually called) would be Lib Dem? Isn't that the aforementioned Watford Rural District, which had three separate parts? Looking at the election results, the Lib Dem strength in Abbots Langley and Leavesden is counterbalanced by South Oxhey, Carpenders Park, and Aldenham/Radlett - the former being Labour and the latter two Conservative. Indeed, although if it was just those wards the Lib Dems would have a majority (12 LD, 7 Con, 3 Lab). But it also included Sarratt and the Brookmeadow area of Borehamwood so I have assigned one councillor from each of the respective wards containing those areas (both Conservative) to the totals (its likely the area of Brookmeadow within Watford RD would vote Labour but in any case it wouldn't be Lib Dem). Additionally there is the one Independent from Nash Mills. I also assigned one of the Lib Dem councillors from Chorleywood South & Maple Cross to the Rickmansworth totals. This is going to be an issue in multiple places because so many ward boundaries will now cross the old boundaries between UDCs/RDCs. In most cases here I have used best fit - for example Tring West & Rural, where 'Tring West' is in Tring UD and 'Rural' is in Berkhamsted RD i have assigned both councillors to Tring as the vast majority of the electors are in that area (in that case it makes no difference to control) but both Sarratt and the area now in Borehamwood are too significant to exclude from the equation.
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Post by Pete Whitehead on Jun 11, 2022 6:56:43 GMT
Dark Grey = Residents Light Grey = NOC
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Post by π΄ββ οΈ Neath West π΄ββ οΈ on Jun 12, 2022 16:07:19 GMT
Dark Grey = Residents Light Grey = NOC This looks like a good argument for moving the Kent/London boundary back to where it ought to be.
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