CJNBlog

The local government geography of England is constantly under review and changes often, but at any one time it sis still quite bewildering. Here's a bit of a 'tour': At the moment, England comprises 27 two-tier counties, 36 metropolitan districts, 56 unitary authorities, 32 London Boroughs and The City of London. The 56 unitary authorities, which don't come under any county council, have the most complexity. 32 (or 34 if you include Isles of Scilly and Isle of Wight which may have been the names of county councils though it isn't obvious from the name) of them contain no reference to a county in their name (by a county, I mean a a well-recognised county name - a something shire, or something like Essex, or Somerset). The remaining 22 can be categorised as follows, the headings being of my devising; 7 County Councils Cornwall, Durham County, Herefordshire, Northumberland, Rutland, Shropshire and Wiltshire - have recognisable county names.  5 Parts of Counties other t

It seems quite obvious to me that the "one community" element of this Barking & Dagenham Council epithet for the borough is put there specifically to address the enduring idea that B&D is divided into two parts. In 1965 two former municipal boroughs did merge to form one London Borough (with other minor changes) and in 1980, those who believed that this merger should be reflected in the LB name won out, and The London Borough of Barking became The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. It is one LB - no question, despite what a few people seem to believe (still), but the two parts idea still persists. I have just seen the draft report of some research I worked on and it is interesting to see the issue touched on by writers who are certainly too young to have any recollection of 1965 and probably too young to have any recollection of 1980. Even so, they are not 'from round here' and would not / could not be expected to grasp the thrust and nuances of this faul

Passengers on my local train line often complain that the train heating or air conditioning is on when it shouldn't be. They seem to be under the illusion that the driver turns the heating on - presumably as a separate operation. I find this extraordinary. The driver gets into the cab and turns on the heating/aircon according to a guess of how hot it is in the carriages. Just a moment's though shows up why this is not true: 1) The c2c class 357 trains can run in formations of 4, 8 or 12 carriages. How can cab controls  be configured to cope with these different configurations? Can the driver control each carriage individually, or each 4 car unit? Maybe s/he can control each HVAC unit separately - I think there are two per carriage - so that could be 24 units on one train. If s/he can control more than just whole train off or whole train on, how does s/he decide what to do in each case s/he has control over? 2) Given that our home and office HVAC systems are controlled by a time

It's still reasonably common to see a phone number in writing preceded with "T:" or "Tel:" and an e-mail or web address similarly, though I expect most people know what these things are without the labels. It's never been the case though that postal addresses have been treated like that. They are of course the pre-eminent address for the physical location of buildings - not least because they use place names with which we are familiar. There are I think relatively few examples of places where the settlement the person lives is in a different county to the post town they must include in their address - Thetford is one such place I think. This needn't be a problem insofar as since 1998 it has not been required to include a county name in a postal address. You may include the name of a county though - but should it be the name of the county in which the post town lies or where your house lies? The post town is really the 'town' in which your postal

There are two problems with SSCs - but one of them isn't really a problem with SSCs as such, but a problem with all automation. The first problem is that at least in my experience they don't work very well. I can hardly remember a time when a session with one of them didn't involve a member of staff coming to my assistance at least once. I believe that there are technical problems with the design  and that these can be ironed out. In the meantime, there will still have to be human trouble shooters /  assistants to get the sessions over successfully. The second problem is automation doing people out of work. The problem here lies with the logic of the economy rather than SSCs themselves. Automation has been taking over human work for a long time and will continue to do so for a long time yet and I hold that this is a good thing, because: 1) The reason for doing work should be that it needs doing and not that someone should not be able to subsist unless they work. 2) If a mac

It came to my attention that the GLA has recommended adding the central section of Thameslink to the Tube Map (in fact a map of all TfL's rail services). This makes no sense, so I contact Caroline Pidgeon (a GLA Member who's on the relevant committee) to find out why and what the thinking is behind putting a section of one non-TfL railway line on a map of TfL only railway lines, when that lime, like all railway lines in London, is shown on the 'London's Tube and Rail Services' map - what used to be called the London Connections Map. CP argued that "the overall objective of the Tube map and indeed of TfL [should be] to effectively serve as many Londoners and visitors to London as is possible in making journeys." To serve as many of these travellers as is possible must surely require a map of all London's railway lines. What justification is there for omitting most non-TfL ones? She mentioned in response to one of my points “the importance of the B