Borderlines

[www.midlandspubs.co.uk]

Where does one district end and another one begin. There are parish maps with boundaries clearly marked so it is easy to determine which parish a given street was in. However, take Brearley Street for example, where EXACTLY does it leave New Town and enter Hockley? This crops up in many streets where it is located in more than one district.

 

[sospiri]

Keiron,

Borders get blurred as infill building takes place over a number of years and separate comunities more or less become one. Even post codes no longer help and tend to exacerbate the issue. I don't think that there is a straight answer to this question.

Maurice

 

[www.midlandspubs.co.uk]

Keiron,

Borders get blurred as infill building takes place over a number of years and separate comunities more or less become one. Even post codes no longer help and tend to exacerbate the issue. I don't think that there is a straight answer to this question.

Maurice

Cheers Maurice, I think it is even more complicated by people. For example, the house in which I grew up was technically in Old Hill but I identified with Cradley Heath. A key reason for asking the question is that I am doing a little work on Brearley Street and would not wish to upset somebody by saying a pub is in New Town when they consider it to be Hockley. For this street in particular I would consider everything west of Great Russell Street to be in Hockley but the rest in New Town. But I am an outsider so what do I know?

 

[devonjim]

Keiron,

Borders get blurred as infill building takes place over a number of years and separate comunities more or less become one. Even post codes no longer help and tend to exacerbate the issue. I don't think that there is a straight answer to this question.

Maurice

I always thought that post codes were for the benefit of the post office and little to nothing to do with the actual borough or district.

 

[sospiri]

True, Jim, and they were relatively late on the scene in this context.

Keiron, before I moved out here, I technically lived in Poole, yet I was only 200 yards over the borough boundary, was three miles from Poole centre and barely a mile from Bournemouth town centre. Then the boundaries technically disappeared last May when Poole, Bournemouth & Christchurch all became one borough, though an outsider would struggle to determine the boundaries long before this happened. It's even more confusing out here in Crete.

Maurice

 

[mikejee]

As a generalisation things alter. Technically I live in West Berkshire (the border is at the bottom of my garden) and 50 years ago i would definmitely been in Berkshire. However the bus services and shops I use are mostly in Reading. On the other side of Reading large areas of the conglomeration are controlled by Wokingham , but for all practical purposes (other than council tax) are Reading. The University is half and half, but for convenience is given a Reading postal code (which can be very confusing for some visitors as part can only be accessed by road from the Wokingham side, so those using digital methods for finding there way can be directed to the wrong entrance. With regard to Kieron's query as to Brearly st I dont feel qualified to say, but would suggest that it is only the more ancient members (which I know might include me if I was bothered) would care about how it was described, as these names are now less meaningful

 

[Jason Ellis]

There are endless variants of the "boundary" conundrum, apart from the fact that things inevitably change over time. When considering "Birmingham" itself it is usually reasonably clear what "Birmingham" means - where it was and where it is physically located. There are often issues with 18th and 19th century residents on the north-east side not quite sure whether they actually lived in Birmingham or Aston (particularly if they were illiterate) but they probably identified with whichever church they attended, rather than where their house stood.

Outside of the big city there are many other complications:

• County boundaries have remained reasonably stable from the days of William the Conqueror until 1974 (when they were seriously shaken up). But until the Counties (Detached Parts) Act 1844 there were many towns and boroughs which were regarded as being in a county, which was in fact an "island" within another county. For example, the ancient parish of Dudley was as an "island" of Worcestershire, totally surrounded by Staffordshire, measuring 11 miles in circumference. When the act of 1844 was passed it ordered all such detached portions of counties to be amalgamated, but somehow Dudley was ignored. After 1888 the enclave was the only land remaining in England detached from its county. The enclave was briefly incorporated into Staffordshire in 1966, but only remained there until it was merged into the artificially created West Midlands Metropolitan county in 1974. Similarly, the medieval Halesowen parish originally in Shropshire was moved back into Worcestershire. If you are interested in Harborne I sympathise. At various time it has been in Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire and West Midlands. That is not to say that Harborne ever "moved", it is the boundaries that have been moved around it.
• Dioscesan borders have rarely aligned with county borders. It is quite common for a town or hamlet to be territorially in one county but parochially/ecclesiastically in a different county.
• Then there is the complication of a once well-known village/hamlet/field pattern being swallowed up by the sprawl of the city, for example "Birmingham Heath" swallowed up by an Enclosure Act to become what we now know as Winson Green. When I spotted one of my ancestors on a census as born in Ninevah, I though, "Wow, how did one of my rellies come to be born in an ancient Assyrian city, now part of Iraq?" Then after some digging I discovered that Ninevah was a rural hamlet on Birmingham Heath close to the Handsworth boundary (infamous as the last recorded location of bull baiting in England!) Who speaks of Ninevah in Birmingham now, even though Ninevah Road still exists?

In summary, how easy it is to fall into the trap of treating one piece of information as "fact", particularly locations and boundaries. They all need checking!

Jason