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The old NSE boundaries are far too broad to make any political and economic sense. Weymouth and Luton are very different places with different public transport needs. We can’t be looking back at everything that BR did and say "let’s do that" because BR wasn’t perfect.
It's not perfect, but it's a way better starting point than the official regions map of England.
Some sort of wider regional body is essential, it's politically untenable that the only political bodies involved in the transport of the southeast are the national government and London's Mayor/TfL.
Cambridge may feel different now, but that is a very recent phenomenon. I grew up in Cambridge and it was a shire county town like most others, apart from having a university attached. In most other respects Cambridge was very similar to Norwich in Norfolk, Ipswich in Suffolk, or other shire county towns like Bedford or Northampton.
Completely agree - furthermore while it IS much more of a global city now, that doesn’t mean it’s like the South East culturally or in terms of character. I wouldn’t say Cambridge is more like Guildford, Reading, Maidstone, or Crawley than it is to Norwich and Ipswich
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It’s definitely not the South East. Cambridgeshire is very much an East Anglian county. Yes of course it’s shown on the South East rail map but that also includes Great Yarmouth, King’s Lynn, Birmingham, Coventry, Worcester, Bristol, and Exeter. I’ve certainly never heard anyone in Cambridge describe Cambridge as anything other than East Anglian.
The old NSE boundaries are far too broad to make any political and economic sense. Weymouth and Luton are very different places with different public transport needs. We can’t be looking back at everything that BR did and say "let’s do that" because BR wasn’t perfect.
I don't think the NSE area is completely implausible. The only strange part would be lumping in West Midlands suburban stations and possibly East Anglia, into the area.
Thinking about how some on here think Thameslink should be under TfL even though Thameslink serves other cities besides London such as Cambridge and Brighton, perhaps a better alternative would be a TfSEE which could work closely with TfL, I know St.Albans, Bedford, Luton, Peterborough and Cambridge aren’t South East England either but many services serving there begin in London, which is also its own region but geographically is in the SE region.
This would be a soft return to Network South East in many ways, but with railways being nationalised could a TfSEE work?
No, because bus operations are far more of a local thing than rail. Network SouthEast could be reformed, but really it could only deal with rail. And the whole South East is too big an area to deal effectively with bus operations and funding.
One could argue for having the railway manage regional bus services like the Bedford-Oxford X5 where those services primarily fill gaps in the railway (as that service does until East West Rail opens), but there are relatively few of these. Nothing would be gained by having Milton Keynes' bus service managed from somewhere miles away - the risk of ending up with a unitary bigger than MK Council as some propose is already a personal concern. The majority of town bus services have little or nothing to do with the railway, being primarily used for local journeys within town, so centralising management of these would bring no benefits.
Completely agree - furthermore while it IS much more of a global city now, that doesn’t mean it’s like the South East culturally or in terms of character. I wouldn’t say Cambridge is more like Guildford, Reading, Maidstone, or Crawley than it is to Norwich and Ipswich
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It’s definitely not the South East. Cambridgeshire is very much an East Anglian county. Yes of course it’s shown on the South East rail map but that also includes Great Yarmouth, King’s Lynn, Birmingham, Coventry, Worcester, Bristol, and Exeter. I’ve certainly never heard anyone in Cambridge describe Cambridge as anything other than East Anglian.
Cambridge IS like Oxford though. Or to an extent like Canterbury.
You could almost draw an inner and outer Southeast area, the inner part only covering places like Reading, High Wycombe, Luton, Stevenage, Stansted, Southend, Medway Towns, Crawley/Gatwick, Guildford etc, whereas the outer area could cover places less dependant on London, but still close enough to be part of the Southeast of England economically.
Cambridge IS like Oxford though. Or to an extent like Canterbury.
You could almost draw an inner and outer Southeast area, the inner part only covering places like Reading, High Wycombe, Luton, Stevenage, Stansted, Southend, Medway Towns, Crawley/Gatwick, Guildford etc, whereas the outer area could cover places less dependant on London, but still close enough to be part of the Southeast of England economically.
Thinking about how some on here think Thameslink should be under TfL even though Thameslink serves other cities besides London such as Cambridge and Brighton, perhaps a better alternative would be a TfSEE which could work closely with TfL, I know St.Albans, Bedford, Luton, Peterborough and Cambridge aren’t South East England either but many services serving there begin in London, which is also its own region but geographically is in the SE region.
This would be a soft return to Network South East in many ways, but with railways being nationalised could a TfSEE work?
NSE is a bit different from this "TfSEE" thing, though, in that that was rail only - are we proposing to incorporate bus operations here? It's that that I don't think would work very well as a doughnut round London is not really how people travel by bus. There are bus services that could do with being more rail-integrated, but most town services aren't that and rarely connect to rail in terms of how people use them.
That's not to say that stuff like moving bus stations to be near railway stations isn't sensible (and the likes) because that's convenient and aside from in very distributed towns has few downsides, but most people taking a bus into town aren't doing it to connect with a train. The highest level of rail use in the South East, commuting, tends to start before the daily bus services do anyway, and that isn't likely to change, thus most people reach stations by private transport of some sort, be that foot, bicycle, scooter hire, car (driver/passenger) or taxi.
Where do we start? A number of different companies, with different operating arrangements, commercial leadership, staff T&Cs, etc. And then the dead hand of HM Treasury pushing through DfT in a way that BR never endured.
NSE worked because a small leadership team were able to take an existing structure, and turn it into a consumer facing brand. That supported a rapid implementation without much need to consult or dilute the message through pre-releases.
Paradoxically, and despite NSE being the antithesis of what we associate with BR, it was an initiative that could only be made to work in a monolithic structure like BR.
Cambridge IS like Oxford though. Or to an extent like Canterbury.
You could almost draw an inner and outer Southeast area, the inner part only covering places like Reading, High Wycombe, Luton, Stevenage, Stansted, Southend, Medway Towns, Crawley/Gatwick, Guildford etc, whereas the outer area could cover places less dependant on London, but still close enough to be part of the Southeast of England economically.
For me the practical commuting south east is where travel is predominantly towards London. From Royston and Great Chesterford northwards - the biggest flows are northwards to Cambridge away from London’s commuter land
Would need proper UK federalisation to work so that the regions of South East and East of England have fiscal powers. It's not unusual in Germany for a small number of states to fund and run joint transport agencies.
Combined Authorities are probably our analogy now, but I'd suggest that the South East is really too big an area for this to make political sense. There would be sense in something like a Four Counties Combined Authority managing regional transport in Beds, Herts, Bucks and Northants*, for instance, maybe adding a fifth to connect Berks as well, as they're quite small counties with a lot of cross-border working, but involving say Kent and/or Essex with this really doesn't make much sense.
And as has already been demonstrated, UK federalisation at a regional level is not acceptable to a lot of the population of England - it is, rightly, seen as trying to break up England because Wales and Scotland don't like being smaller and less populous.
* Debatably this might integrate better with Warks, that said.
Combined Authorities are probably our analogy now, but I'd suggest that the South East is really too big an area for this to make political sense. There would be sense in something like a Four Counties Combined Authority managing regional transport in Beds, Herts, Bucks and Northants*, for instance, maybe adding a fifth to connect Berks as well, as they're quite small counties with a lot of cross-border working, but involving say Kent and/or Essex with this really doesn't make much sense.
And as has already been demonstrated, UK federalisation at a regional level is not acceptable to a lot of the population of England - it is, rightly, seen as trying to break up England because Wales and Scotland don't like being smaller and less populous.
* Debatably this might integrate better with Warks, that said.
Federalisation hasn’t really been tested - aside from the North East referendum which Domenic Cummins opposed back in 2004 - what happened to him. Most regional government reorganisation doesn’t interest people. The issue with the UK is that it’s completed lopsided in terms of population with England comprising 86% of the total population. That’s why there are 9 English regions to each of the other three nations/province. I don’t think the current regional mayoral devolution going on is particularly well loved - most people aren’t that interested in governance structures but England is too large to have a national government given its almost as big as the UK government so wouldn’t see any devolution of services or things being closer to users as has been the case in Wales and Scotland which are much smaller in terms of population. The problem with the regions is that aside from the official regions used for statistical purposes, regions unlike historic counties (not more modern ceremonial counties and administrative divisions) have blurred boundaries. You could debate all day what constitutes the North, South, Midlands, Home Countie, East Anglia, South West/Westcountry. I guess this is partly because there are so many versions - football regional divisions, TV regions, water company regions, Met office regions, company regions. Take Milton Keynes as a good example - I’ve heard it referred to as the South, the South East, the East of England, the South Midlands, the Midlands, the Home Counties, the Northern Home Counties etc. And I think therein lies the problem with dividing England into fixed regions.
Do any towns or suburban areas in any of these German examples see sudden drops in level of public transport, like we see with buses in places near London?
I would care less about boundaries if bus frequencies between say London and Herts didn't fall off a cliff seemingly after the first town in Herts. At least with Germany, these wider regions around cities have formal names to identify them, Home Counties or South East England are too broad.
And see what you mean with Hamburg and Pinneberg for example. But if both the buses and trains are broadly comparable in both towns/ cities, it's not like the UK where a change of county amounts to a postcode lottery.
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Because of how London and the surrounding areas function and interact with each other, this is precisely what is happening though. With no will to address it.
Maybe but Cambridge feels different to places like Peterborough, Bury St Edmunds, Kings Lynn, Ipswich, Norwich, even Ely etc. It's hard to explain. I agree with Cambridge being in East Anglia though but Herts and Essex being put with all these places in the East definitely feels wrong.
While I agree with the principle that a Redcliffe-Maud MkII is overdue, such an exercise will necessarily have to be an initial technocratic exercise followed by hefty political modifications. While there is (in my view) strong technical justification that London is underbounded, precisely where the new boundary should fall will always be subjective. Economic units overlap but political units (of the same level) cannot. There is absolutely no objective measure to determine where South East stops and East starts. Different people will have different ideas of what 'feels' different and they are all valid.
Given the very strong views you hold on such things, whatever the outcome of such Redcliffe-Maud MkII you will be disappointed because it won't exactly conform to 'your way'.
While I agree with the principle that a Redcliffe-Maud MkII is overdue, such an exercise will necessarily have to be an initial technocratic exercise followed by hefty political modifications. While there is (in my view) strong technical justification that London is underbounded, precisely where the new boundary should fall will always be subjective. Economic units overlap but political units (of the same level) cannot. There is absolutely no objective measure to determine where South East stops and East starts. Different people will have different ideas of what 'feels' different and they are all valid.
Given the very strong views you hold on such things, whatever the outcome of such Redcliffe-Maud MkII you will be disappointed because it won't exactly conform to 'your way'.
The thing is, if transport provision wasn't affected so much by the boundaries, literally wouldn't give a toss about them. Just living in London and then outside of it now, I don't get the disparity in buses, trains are generally fine but of best use if in walking distance. Also maybe because we're coming out of years of underfunding, that's probably amplified the impact of these boundaries. Too many close together like in the Lea Valley in such conditions and the whole area suffers.
Thing is as well, I'm only really interested in London and the commuter belt and green belt around it. The same area that was once London Country, the wider area here that made the new towns necessary in the first place. Not so interested in other city regions that could be argued as underbounded like Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham, Liverpool, Bristol etc. That's for someone else to fight their corner. Just seems bonkers with a huge city like London but a total lack of a regional strategy so it can function as best as it can (like SERPLAN once did). Literally nothing in between TFL and the boroughs, counties and districts and then the national government, DFT, MHCLG etc
And I agree it's all subjective, that's why to me the only accurate definition of a city region is anywhere where there is continuous development beyond Greater London, as is the case in Cheshunt, Watford, Borehamwood, Loughton etc.
Strategically certain policy areas, especially transport and housing require regional solutions. And England could stay divided as it is for all I care, as long as it's not parochial and tribal about it.
So less bothered about a Redcliffe Maud type reform and more how do government structures be used to deliver properly for areas so there is much less of a postcode lottery.
Visited Ireland a few months ago and it seemed like the administrative boundaries were irrelevant as far as public transport is concerned, how it should be.
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Combined Authorities are probably our analogy now, but I'd suggest that the South East is really too big an area for this to make political sense. There would be sense in something like a Four Counties Combined Authority managing regional transport in Beds, Herts, Bucks and Northants*, for instance, maybe adding a fifth to connect Berks as well, as they're quite small counties with a lot of cross-border working, but involving say Kent and/or Essex with this really doesn't make much sense.
The Eastern side of Herts has to go with Essex, end that cursed 3 county boundary once and for all.
Maybe a North Home Counties Authority (Essex, Herts, Beds) and a South Home Counties Authority (Surrey, Kent, maybe Sussex) filling in the gap left to the west by the proposed Thames Valley Authority (Bucks, Berks, Oxfordshire, Swindon) would be a better solution.
Thing is as well, I'm only really interested in London and the commuter belt and green belt around it. The same area that was once London Country, the wider area here that made the new towns necessary in the first place. Not so interested in other city regions that could be argued as underbounded like Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham, Liverpool, Bristol etc.
Indeed. Hamburg vs. Liverpool provides a fairly good comparison as the two cities are structurally quite similar in terms of their transport networks, even having an analogy to Ormskirk north of the city where the EMUs meet the DMUs end-on (ish) in Norderstedt-Mitte - a key difference being that Norderstedt is considered part of Hamburg whereas Ormskirk isn't considered part of Liverpool even though it functionally is!
And I agree it's all subjective, that's why to me the only accurate definition of a city region is anywhere where there is continuous development beyond Greater London, as is the case in Cheshunt, Watford, Borehamwood, Loughton etc.
Watford is a good example - all logic says that it should be in Greater London. It's functionally part of it. It's even inside the M25! Harder to define to the west though, with Slough sort of being functionally part of London and sort of not.
Visited Ireland a few months ago and it seemed like the administrative boundaries were irrelevant as far as public transport is concerned, how it should be.
I do think we could in some cases do with larger "Verbund" areas managing transport - for instance in the North West there should probably be a single North West conurbation (Preston south to Chester, Liverpool east to Manchester, roughly) transport organisation rather than two separate ones for Liverpool and Manchester and an unholy mess in between, and there'd be a similar argument for a slightly more multi centric "Transport for Yorkshire" rather than separate ones for Leeds and Sheffield which like Liverpool and Manchester form a sort of conurbation that works together a lot of the time even if it wouldn't admit it does. But while Transport for Wales does work, I think Transport for England, and even Transport for the South East, would be a bit big, and I still think even with Wales the Cardiff-Newport-Swansea metropolitan area probably needs its own management of transport for its local needs laid on top of the national system. What you need to look for in defining such areas is coherent travel-to-work/leisure areas, and while in the South East that involves heading into London for most, local transport isn't coherent between Milton Keynes and Kent in that sort of way, though it probably is to some extent within the "Three Counties" of Beds, Herts and Bucks (maybe adding Oxon and Berks too, but not really beyond), perhaps as a group analogous to Yorkshire.
In Germany there are municipal agencies within Verbund areas - like KVB under VRS, so no reason why we couldn't have TfGM under a North West organisation.
A North West transport body really needs a regional government layer - the county councils are far too small and disparate to give unified direction to that body and make executive decisions.
Indeed. Hamburg vs. Liverpool provides a fairly good comparison as the two cities are structurally quite similar in terms of their transport networks, even having an analogy to Ormskirk north of the city where the EMUs meet the DMUs end-on (ish) in Norderstedt-Mitte - a key difference being that Norderstedt is considered part of Hamburg whereas Ormskirk isn't considered part of Liverpool even though it functionally is!
Looking at the area it reminds me of Cockfosters and Oakwood on the Piccadilly Line for some reason. As for Liverpool, places like Kirkby and Ormskirk where Merseyrail and Northern meet, it really is a bizarre area.
Watford is a good example - all logic says that it should be in Greater London. It's functionally part of it. It's even inside the M25! Harder to define to the west though, with Slough sort of being functionally part of London and sort of not.
Chances are if its a town within 5 miles of Greater London, it makes logical sense to include in the city today. Towns west of London, it's definitely blurrier though.
I do think we could in some cases do with larger "Verbund" areas managing transport - for instance in the North West there should probably be a single North West conurbation (Preston south to Chester, Liverpool east to Manchester, roughly) transport organisation rather than two separate ones for Liverpool and Manchester and an unholy mess in between, and there'd be a similar argument for a slightly more multi centric "Transport for Yorkshire" rather than separate ones for Leeds and Sheffield which like Liverpool and Manchester form a sort of conurbation that works together a lot of the time even if it wouldn't admit it does. But while Transport for Wales does work, I think Transport for England, and even Transport for the South East, would be a bit big, and I still think even with Wales the Cardiff-Newport-Swansea metropolitan area probably needs its own management of transport for its local needs laid on top of the national system. What you need to look for in defining such areas is coherent travel-to-work/leisure areas, and while in the South East that involves heading into London for most, local transport isn't coherent between Milton Keynes and Kent in that sort of way, though it probably is to some extent within the "Three Counties" of Beds, Herts and Bucks (maybe adding Oxon and Berks too, but not really beyond), perhaps as a group analogous to Yorkshire.
I look at what Liverpool Region is doing and Greater Manchester is doing and I'm like why don't they team up and include Lancashire and Cheshire?, they want broadly the same things when it comes to transport, would make more sense. Unholy mess lol but seems sadly true with Chester and Warrington stuck in the middle!
Agree on Yorkshire and South Wales. South and West Yorkshire seem like natural areas to plan transport together. But with Wales opting for 4 regions for bus franchising, maybe what you are saying will extend to their trains in the future. SW Wales franchise centres on Swansea (a natural point for trains too) and SE Wales franchise centres on Cardiff and Newport with Mid Wales and North Wales being natural areas on their own.
On London and the neighbouring areas, travel to work areas are ideally what it would be based on and you're right it's far from homogenous, a large section of West London and the Thames Valley including Slough centres on Heathrow instead of London as a whole.
I think what is surprising with somewhere like Herts is that has around half the population of West Yorkshire in an area roughly the size of Greater London, makes the shire part a bit outdated for most of it.
Looking at the area it reminds me of Cockfosters and Oakwood on the Piccadilly Line for some reason. As for Liverpool, places like Kirkby and Ormskirk where Merseyrail and Northern meet, it really is a bizarre area.
In the case of Ormskirk it's really just that the substantial built up area ends there (though it's headed north towards Burscough now) and the line gains a very rural character which isn't justifying of four EMUs an hour. In the case of Headbolt it's just because money, Merseyrail would always have gone to Wigan Wallgate bay if built in full per the 1970s plan, it just never actually did.
There are of course (back on topic) similar sort-of examples in London such as the Chiltern line beyond Amersham, though unlike Ormskirk that does retain its infrequent through DMU service to London, I suppose analogous to if the Preston DMU continued on to Liverpool.
I think what is surprising with somewhere like Herts is that has around half the population of West Yorkshire in an area roughly the size of Greater London, makes the shire part a bit outdated for most of it.
Again this is a very London centric perspective. Looked at from the Fens Hertfordshire is predominantly rural all the way to at least Welwyn and Hertford.
So less bothered about a Redcliffe Maud type reform and more how do government structures be used to deliver properly for areas so there is much less of a postcode lottery.
If we ripped up the map and started again, it probably wouldn't be that hard to put boundaries where they actually make sense. For instance (away from the SE) the Pennines provide an obvious break between the North West and Yorkshire. While there is commuting across that break, it's far lower than the commuting to the big centres on each side. This is something I quite strongly call for in the new unitarisation process rather than just lumping together boroughs - for instance you really want to bring Buckingham and surrounds into MK as a travel to work/leisure area, not just have it languishing in Bucks unitary when it has nothing to do with High Wycombe.
With regard to the SE, you sort of have a similar break - interestingly it's roughly the oft-quoted Watford Gap (or Long Buckby if you want a station for it). But it does complicate the SE a bit that you basically have a load of places that relate to London but not to one another, which is quite difficult to provide for compared to the more web-like North.
No, because bus operations are far more of a local thing than rail. Network SouthEast could be reformed, but really it could only deal with rail. And the whole South East is too big an area to deal effectively with bus operations and funding.
One could argue for having the railway manage regional bus services like the Bedford-Oxford X5 where those services primarily fill gaps in the railway (as that service does until East West Rail opens), but there are relatively few of these. Nothing would be gained by having Milton Keynes' bus service managed from somewhere miles away - the risk of ending up with a unitary bigger than MK Council as some propose is already a personal concern. The majority of town bus services have little or nothing to do with the railway, being primarily used for local journeys within town, so centralising management of these would bring no benefits.
You could argue though that integrating in bus operation giving seamless ticketing across a wide part of Britain, could be beneficial. Especially if this Super-Phoenix-rise-from-the-ashes-NSE was rolled into a regional body with housing planning as well. Now where’s that Masters essay I wrote…
Regional buses, yes. Urban buses in South East towns and small cities, probably not. Most journeys on these buses do not connect to rail and are unlikely to do so.
Most countries with a more regulated system than ours differentiate between regional buses which are often operated by the state railway and urban buses which are often operated by the city council or some sort of proxy for it. Even the Netherlands has something like this, with the larger cities having their own operations (e.g. GVB in Amsterdam and HTM in Den Haag) and the separate state-tendered regional bus networks, though admittedly their fares aren't integrated with the railway which has always sat separately for some reason I don't quite understand. (You can use the OV-Chipkaart for all of it, but the fare structures are totally separate).
Wales seems to be headed that way, with the regional services under Trawscymru controlled by TfW and becoming more integrated, but the likes of Cardiff Bus probably likely to remain locally controlled in some form even if it ends up under the TfW banner.
Using the South East example, that probably means that (around by me) you would have stuff like the X5 Bedford-Oxford integrated (at least pre East West Rail, what happens after that is a good question) as well as the X6 Milton Keynes-Aylesbury (again pending an East West Rail service), but probably not the Milton Keynes local services as they have basically no relevance to rail at all, with hardly anyone using them to catch trains and most people simply using them to go shopping or to work in town. That doesn't of course mean to say you shouldn't have PlusBus analogies or a Milton Keynes travel zone paid contactless with bus and rail in the same system for local trips - you probably should - but the bus network isn't and shouldn't be primarily planned around rail connections but rather around optimal local travel.
One could argue for a TfSEE to control these alongside Network SouthEast area rail, and perhaps to deal with local bus in very small places where the local Council doesn't have the competence, but not in larger towns where it needs to be locally specified and delivered for the most local benefit.
If we ripped up the map and started again, it probably wouldn't be that hard to put boundaries where they actually make sense. For instance (away from the SE) the Pennines provide an obvious break between the North West and Yorkshire. While there is commuting across that break, it's far lower than the commuting to the big centres on each side. This is something I quite strongly call for in the new unitarisation process rather than just lumping together boroughs - for instance you really want to bring Buckingham and surrounds into MK as a travel to work/leisure area, not just have it languishing in Bucks unitary when it has nothing to do with High Wycombe.
With regard to the SE, you sort of have a similar break - interestingly it's roughly the oft-quoted Watford Gap (or Long Buckby if you want a station for it). But it does complicate the SE a bit that you basically have a load of places that relate to London but not to one another, which is quite difficult to provide for compared to the more web-like North.
It isn't going to happen, but I'm a great believer in watersheds as natural boundaries. Rivers can be boundaries too, but these days only if they are very big and difficult to bridge.
The 1974 reorganisation did move the boundary between Yorkshire and Lancashire in the Pennines.
Watford Gap is very close to the 3 way watershed of England above Kilsby and Charwelton tunnels. As an Anglian nationalist I do claim all land that drains into the Wash including the Nene and the Great Ouse up to source. On the other hand, anything that drains into the River Lea is not Anglian. The bit I can't decide is which Essex rivers are Anglian and which are not, but the Stour and the Colne are definitely Anglian.
That's an interesting point, but there's logic there. Watersheds tend to be hills or other raised land because that's how water flows, and before things like tunnels and the internal combustion engine getting people and things over big hills was a lot of effort (and still can be, e.g. try driving over the Woodhead or Snake Passes when it's snowy and icey). Thus travel-to-work and travel-to-leisure areas developed around the "bowls" between this raised land. While adding in stuff like Milton Keynes does change things a bit (e.g. Buckingham associates more that way now than to Aylesbury before) there hasn't been much of that sort of seismic change, and so patterns are probably not dissimilar to what they were 100+ years ago, albeit with people being a bit more mobile due to faster trains and more affordable and reliable private motoring.
Again this is a very London centric perspective. Looked at from the Fens Hertfordshire is predominantly rural all the way to at least Welwyn and Hertford.
To me, only East and North Herts are THAT rural. The rest of the county including across to Harlow or to the Chilterns, there is a town or large village every couple miles. Watford, St Albans, Hemel, Hatfield, Welwyn especially are close enough to almost be touching each other! Hardly far enough apart for the countryside to have a positive effective on the traffic or break up the built up mass. Really it's a county of two halves pulled in at least 4 directions and somehow it's expected to stay together. Neighbouring Essex becomes rural far quicker but the part of Herts I refer to is akin to South Essex, it's a bolted on set of towns close together and all within commuting distance to London.
And is being London centric that bad of a thing? It is my world after all, just because my address is outside now. To me that just shows how messy the current arrangements are. Looked at aerial photos of my area (Historic England) from the 40s, my estate didn't exist just yet but even back then Cheshunt had dispersed ribbon development everywhere, in part because of the Hertford Road towards London. Which like now, only adds to the messiness when it comes to boundaries.
You wouldn't put it at Waltham Cross if we were starting from scratch now though. Could be set on the M11 somewhere near Sawbridgeworth where it's far more rural for example.
East Grinstead is in West Sussex but is near a 4 county border area but because the 4 counties meet in a field a few miles away, no such issues arise like they do with Herts, Essex or London. Would be a very different story if East Grinstead was divided in 4 like Berlin was!
To me, only East and North Herts are THAT rural. The rest of the county including across to Harlow or to the Chilterns, there is a town or large village every couple miles. Watford, St Albans, Hemel, Hatfield, Welwyn especially are close enough to almost be touching each other! Hardly far enough apart for the countryside to have a positive effective on the traffic or break up the built up mass. Really it's a county of two halves pulled in at least 4 directions and somehow it's expected to stay together. Neighbouring Essex becomes rural far quicker but the part of Herts I refer to is akin to South Essex, it's a bolted on set of towns close together and all within commuting distance to London.
And is being London centric that bad of a thing? It is my world after all, just because my address is outside now. To me that just shows how messy the current arrangements are. Looked at aerial photos of my area (Historic England) from the 40s, my estate didn't exist just yet but even back then Cheshunt had dispersed ribbon development everywhere, in part because of the Hertford Road towards London. Which like now, only adds to the messiness when it comes to boundaries.
You wouldn't put it at Waltham Cross if we were starting from scratch now though. Could be set on the M11 somewhere near Sawbridgeworth where it's far more rural for example.
East Grinstead is in West Sussex but is near a 4 county border area but because the 4 counties meet in a field a few miles away, no such issues arise like they do with Herts, Essex or London. Would be a very different story if East Grinstead was divided in 4 like Berlin was!
They only need to put urban and suburban areas near each other together, that shouldn't be so hard. Whoever divided it up the way it is now is way more self centred.
They only need to put urban and suburban areas near each other together, that shouldn't be so hard. Whoever divided it up the way it is now is way more self centred.
You need to step back and look at how those boundaries formed, then reconsider your opinion.
The county boundaries that form the basis of administrative structures have developed over many centuries. They inspire deep loyalties (I suggest you listen to Mark Steel's in Town from Oakham to get a flavour of this), and politicians have learned to their cost not to tinker with them. Like any line on a map, the boundaries are imperfect, and give rise to anomalies.
But one iron rule runs through those - that the administrative areas correspond to political governance. If you change that, you can guarantee that those served by but who can't vote for those politicians will struggle for influence.
You've explained your circumstances before, and no one disputes that you've drawn a short straw in how those boundaries affect you personally. What's much more questionable is whether, if you add up for all the others in the same area (especially including the vast majority who you will never have spoken to), the balance of opinion would match. Especially if it came with other London policies - ULEZ, for example.
East Grinstead is in West Sussex but is near a 4 county border area but because the 4 counties meet in a field a few miles away, no such issues arise like they do with Herts, Essex or London. Would be a very different story if East Grinstead was divided in 4 like Berlin was!
