Hi Colin, Thanks for the reply and offer of assistance, and also thanks for your administrative boundary gpx files which have been very useful for mapping local parishes.
I was aware of the mapping of ceremonial counties but they're actually based upon the post-1974 administrative counties with the inclusion of the related unitary authorities ie. you have ceremonial counties such as Merseyside and Greater Manchester. Yorkshire is split into four such ceremonial counties and some of the Yorkshire Dales lie in the ceremonial county of Cumbria. Regarding time scale, most counties retained their traditional form until the 1974 local government reforms. You're right that Yorkshire and Sussex were exceptional in that their large size meant that much of the day to day administration was devolved into subdivisions much earlier but they still existed as whole entities until that date and i'd suggest that people still identified with the 'county' rather than the administrative subdivision. My view was that - like teh Irish Townlands project - there's still a cultural relevance to these historical units and I thought it a good potential use of boundary=historical, but if the consensus is that it's not a good idea then that's fine. Thanks again, Adam Hi Adam, OSM does contain "Ceremonial Counties", i.e. Lieutenancy areas (in England). They are mapped as boundary=ceremonial. Basically they represent the counties as they existed just before the 1974 LGA. The boundaries still change occasionally to keep pace with (minor) changes to administrative boundaries, but that is done by separate legislative changes which are enacted "in sync" with the admin boundary changes. They have their own boundary relation in OSM unless they are not coterminous with the administrative county. In those cases, sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't have their own relation. We don't need old OS maps for these boundaries as they are published as part of the OS Boundary-Line data set. However, if you mean "historical" in the sense of "really old", that's a different discussion, about historical data - i.e. things that no longer exist at all. Most people agree that OSM is not the right place to put things that really don't exist any more. There have been nasty discussions in the past about the trackbeds of abandoned railways... You mentioned "Yorkshire" and "Sussex" - how far do you have to go back to find these as single entities? We are talking hundreds of years... But it would be very easy to create a new relation to combine East+West Sussex and Brighton&Hove and call it "Sussex", but is that what you mean? Does "Sussex" actually have sharp borders? I do a lot of work with the UK admin boundaries in OSM - let me know if I can help further. //colin
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