h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Or if you want a county it's in the West Midlands - presumably Warwickshire is it's historic county.

Ah, Sandwell & Dudley station, go past it everyday on the way to work. Brings such a ray of sunshine as I sail past in a train

Glagows miles better.

NewYork, the big apple.

Gay Paris.

Sandwell, at least its not Stoke-on-Trent.

*inconviently comments on something said two pages ago*

Postcodes are crap to go by- I live in Staffordshire but have a DE postcode becuase the nearest sorting office is Derby.

Also, the West Midlands isn't a county, it's a region.

so why is it written as a county on my works address?

Birmingham,
West Midlands,
Bnn nXX

Not quibbling, just curious as to why this might be?

(p.s. didn;t realise you were another Staffs person KA!)

The West Midlands is a Metrapolitan County/Borough/Thingy.

similarly so are Greater London, greater Manchester, Merseyside etc.

I should know this as I work for the council bit the utter stupifying boredom of it all has caused me to inadvertanly, but for obvious reasons, expunge the answers from my brain.

From Derbyshire originally, now in Staffs.

Having looked into it, I have discovered that someone in their wisdom decided there should be *three* entities called the West Midlands. One is a county, and takes in Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Coventry. One is a region, and includes Herefordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire. The other is a purely geographical term covering the western half of the Midlands.

Clear now?

Correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that Sandwell as an entity has only really existed for the last couple of years. I remember there being a lot of cafuffle about it in the Brum news back then.
In which case, putting it in an historic county is a bit of a moot point?

Orcus Merseyside isn't a Metropolitan Bourough, it's a grouping of 4 of them; Sefton, Liverpool itself, St. Helens and Knowsley and Halton and this may change as there is an issue over whether Sefton should split, separating the poor of Liverpool's inner city from the rich in it's lovely northern suburbs. It's interesting what people are saying about postcodes because Southport is in Sefton and so Merseyside but has a PR (Preston) postcode because it was in Lancashire and it's own telephone code. Formby, which is a halfway between Liverpool and Southport has the Southport telephone code but Liverpool postcodes and would probably be right on the border if Sefton splits

Sorry I'm not sure what that really means anyway which is why I put the word Thingy in there

The West Midlands as far as I know has no unitary authority, Birmingham has its own council as do Wolverhampton, Solihull, Coventry, Dudley, Sandwell etc. However, there *is* a definitive border drawn around it all (bounded by those *natural* boundaries, the M42, M6 and M5 ) so it sort of counts as a county these days.
As someone said above the word West Midlands is in our address and not Warwickshire/Staffordshire or whatever.

My guess is that you put Merseyside in your address as opposed to Lancashire these days? Wasn't Manchester also in Lancashire historically but apparently no longer?

There are people who get upset about these thing you know

Surely postcodes merely depend on where your nearest postal sorting office is and have no bearing on your county or whatever.

I grew up in Bedford which is a county town yet has MK (Milton Keynes) post codes.

Yeah I use Merseyside because it is accurate, I live in North Liverpool which is on the banks of the Mersey. Many people who live in Southport resent using Merseyside because they have a Lancastrian postcode and also Southport is on the shores of the Irish Sea, the Mersey estuary ends 10 miles away so they have geographical justification. If Sefton does split then it will be interesting to see whether the new northe bit is in Lancashire or Merseyside because it will still have towns that have the L and towns that have PR as postcodes. I don't really care.

It's still a bit annoying that they're fiddling about with county borders, though. I used to live in a town called Keynsham, between Bristol and Bath, and when I arrived there it was slap bang in the middle of a county called Avon. However, just as I left for where I am now, Avon was about to be split back into Gloucestershire and Somerset (as it had been before 1974). This means that although Keynsham is now in Somerset, it still has a Bristol postcode (I think Bristol is now one of those metropolitan counties, although it used to be in Gloucestershire).

Confused? So was I ...

Bristol is both a city and a county, much as it was before 1974. The 'Metropolitan Counties' were carved out of England's ancient shires at that time by Ted Heath's government (Peter Walker was the minister responsible), but haven't existed as administrative areas since Maggie abolished their councils in the late eighties. Since then it's been a bit of a mess as none of the areas were reintegrated into their historic counties.

As far as I can remember, the areas involved were:

Greater London - London, all of Middlesex and chunks of the surrounding counties.
Avon - Bristol, north Somerset and south Gloucestershire.
West Midlands - large chunks of Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Staffordshire etc. (i.e. everything around Birmingham)
Merseyside - Liverpool and the area of Lancashire surrounding it, along with the Wirral peninsula of Cheshire.
Greater Manchester - south Lancashire, north east Cheshire and Saddleworth (an area of the West Riding of Yorkshire which happens to be on the wrong side of the Pennines).
West Yorkshire - half of the West Riding of Yorkshire, including Leeds, Halifax, Bradford, Huddersfield and Wakefield.
South Yorkshire - the rest of the West Riding, including Sheffield, Doncaster and Rotherham.
Humberside - the East Riding of Yorkshire and north Lincolnshire.

There were also various places like Teesside and Cleveland in the northeast, but I have to confess that my knowledge of that part of the country is minimal to say the least...

Hmm, Greater London. And so we come full circle back to the original question. I used to live in Croydon, which has a CR postcode, postal address of Surrey, but is part of the London Borough of Croydon, and has an 020 telephone code. Confused? It is policed by the Metropolitan Police, despite Surrey having a police for of its very own.

I now live somewhere that is genuinely in London. When asked on internet forms for "county", I leave it blank, having already put "London" in the "Town/City" field. But there's one (there's always one, isn't there?) badly-designed form that not only *insisted* that I type something there, it insisted that address lines 2 and 3 were compulsory fields. I receive goods from this company addressed to me thusly:

Mr. R. Freddy
# Streetname Streettype
London
London
London
London
Postcode
UK.

this is the only way that I can get them to send me stuff.

Sorry, but