Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK geography/How to write about parishes

Unparished areas

@Stortford and Esemgee: I've made a few changes to this namely removing unparished areas from being inherently notable and saying they don't generally need to be mentioned in the lead. I think we do need to keep the point about the fact that they should be covered in the settlement of the same name rather than split into separate articles and also keep the point about how we generally define them. Crouch, Swale (talk) 18:28, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Where has it been established that they are inherently notable? They are only notable if there are reliable sources to something other than they exist/ed. They shouldn't be mentioned in the lead and neither should former civil parishes and certainly no unparished areas. These guidelines have been produced to promote your own point of view on these very inconsequential divisions. Please do not refer to them as "parishes". There are more, ancient and ecclesiastical come to mind, and these days most people relate parish to church. Why such a minor area needs guidelines is astonishing to me. While promoting these minor divisions you have ignored more important urban districts, municipal and county boroughs, dropped historic population figures in leads. It's very tiresome, confusing and makes work for other editors. Only recently you were adding civil parish as a section heading despite being told not to, do you really think I'm going to work my way through these "guidelines"?

WP:GEOLAND and WP:PLACEOUTCOMES. You said about not using "Civil parish" as a section so I stopped doing that but I' not sure its a bad idea, yes we should be covering things like district as well which would appear in the same section like "Governance" but if the articles don't yet cover the district etc then "Civil parish" as a header seems fine. Most former civil parishes in the rest of the country do not have a former district of the same name, its only really in West Yorkshire that had a proliferation of small districts. I don't have time to add information about districts to articles as well but you can do so which would be helpful but please be careful not to conflate parishes and districts even if you're dealing with an urban parish concurrent with its district, thanks. Crouch, Swale (talk) 20:49, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks @Crouch, Swale - I've now made some more substantive amendments to the guidance for discussing unparished areas and former civil parishes which hopefully make sense. Stortford (talk) 06:36, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, I think there may be a few more things we need to look at and how we are going to deal with Braintree and Bocking, I've thought about how to deal with it a bit recently but haven't though of anything really worth doing, I'll post something more detailed this evening. Crouch, Swale (talk) 06:51, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@Stortford: Regarding unparished areas like Braintree and Bocking and Spenborough what should we do with the articles? Spenborough is currently only on the "former" area and not the unparished area while the "Braintree and Bocking" article is about the unparished area but discusses the former area. In terms of the point about there being no official name/boundary can we say this for sure? The very fact that UKBMD until a few years back listed the individual unparished areas by the definition of the urban district that was abolished as well as what Skinsmoke claimed suggests that there at least has been a definition. As mentioned the map in nearby Panfield makes shows the surrounding parishes and shows "Braintree and Bocking" as unparished. IMO the article isn't problematic and by using the word "unparished area" suggests its not a "functioning" administrative unit and users can click on the link if needed. That said I accept that we haven't been able to find and legislation saying how unparished areas are defined, the statistical sources (City Population and Mapit) refer to "Braintree" and at the time I created this article UKBMD used "Braintree". Would putting a footnote about the name of the unparished area help? While the consensus was clear not to describe other areas as being/being in unparished areas in the lead the consensus was far less clear on what we should do with articles that are only about them and I suggested its not a good idea to strip the article back to 1974. Thoughts?

On a side note in the future if a single new parish called "Braintree and Bocking" is formed then we can just update this to mention that it became a parish again, if multiple parishes are formed then we can just update the article to say its no longer unparished and if a parish called just "Braintree" is formed covering the whole area we can just merge this article to the "Braintree" article for the same reason as Wareside. Crouch, Swale (talk) 19:16, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Thank you @Stortford: much more appropriate.

As regards Aireborough and Spenborough, possibly others, they sould be turned into articles about the urban district like Potters Bar Urban District. Esemgee (talk) 20:43, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

@Crouch, Swale Yes, I'm confident on the unparished areas not having names and there being no internal boundaries between unparished areas covering an area that was previously multiple adjoining urban districts / boroughs. We have discussed this previously in various discussions elsewhere, but for the benefit of setting it out in one place:

• Section 1 (9) of the Local Government Act 1972 says that "On that date [1 April 1974]... urban districts, rural districts and urban parishes, shall cease to exist and the council of every such area which has a council shall also cease to exist." No further provision was made for definition of unparished areas - it isn't a term that was used by the act but has been subsequently coined to describe the gaps at parish level left behind as a consequence.
• Where legislation needs to describe an unparished area it has to do so by convoluted descriptions as in The Housing (Right to Enfranchise) (Designated Protected Areas) (England) Order 2009 which refers to one unparished area as being the unparished area of the Mole Valley constituency, with a footnote to say that it contains the settlements of Leatherhead and Dorking, and describes another unparished area by reference to the parishes and districts it borders, with a footnote to say it contains the settlements of Woldingham, Warlingham and Caterham. Had it been the case that each abolished urban district was an unparished area with the names and boundaries they had held pre-1974, it would have been much easier to describe the first example as "the (two) unparished areas of Leatherhead and Dorking" and the second as "the unparished area of Caterham and Warlingham". They didn't, and we see that the first example was described as a single unparished area despite being two former urban districts, and from the second example we see that the old urban district name of "Caterham and Warlingham" doesn't even appear in the footnote - it's described as containing the three settlements of Woldingham, Warlingham and Caterham.
• The Office for National Statistics at their Open Geography portal maps have a layer of parishes and unparished areas. All unparished areas within a single district are shown as one unparished area named after the district, so you get for example "North Hertfordshire, unparished area" rather than three named unparished areas of Hitchin / Letchworth / Baldock. Even when unparished areas within the same district don't adjoin they are still coded as one unparished area - click on the polygon covering the former borough of Buxton and you'll see that the separate polygon covering Glossop is also highlighted, both being lumped together as "High Peak, unparished area" despite not adjoining.
• City Population does then provide statistics for unparished areas, but follows the ONS definition above, grouping all unparished parts of each district into a single entry under the name of the district rather than the former urban districts / boroughs.
• UKBMD is a very diligent piece of work, but it has never been official guidance. It is published by those with an interest in genealogy; it is produced to assist people in researching their family trees. It has also in the last couple of years changed its tables to match the ONS definitions.
• Historic England in the National Heritage List gives the parish for every listed building. For those not in a parish it says "non civil parish" with no name given to it.

If you find alternative reliable sources on unparished areas having names and boundaries sufficient to outweigh the above, I'd be interested to see them, but I have looked and found nothing authoritative. Yes, you do find the occasional example, as we saw with that Derbyshire County Council map which named the county's unparished areas, but something produced by officers at one council (probably like UKBMD in a spirit of being helpful to the public) does not override the official situation laid out above. (I don't think Derbyshire has any unparished areas covering multiple adjoining former urban districts - I wonder how they would have shown them on that map if they had.)

I think the Spenborough article is correctly focussed on the district which existed between 1915 and 1974, and also discusses the extent to which the name is still used for a handful of organisations post-1974. There is no "Spenborough unparished area", it is part of the wider Kirklees unparished area covering all the bits of the modern Kirklees district with no parishes. I think we should refocus the Braintree and Bocking article likewise on the urban district which existed 1934–1974 and note any continuing legacy uses of the name. Until July this year Braintree and Bocking was a redirect to the Braintree article. Your edit summary when you created the page was "create separate article for unparished area with distinct name". I do hope you can now appreciate that was factually incorrect - no unparished area has a distinct name. If new parishes are created, we go with whatever official names and areas they are given. Thanks Stortford (talk) 06:35, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

@Stortford: Sorry for the late reply. I think based on this there isn't enough evidence anymore to keep them defined as unparished areas. Its a shame I hadn't asked Skinsmoke what section of the 1972 act specified how unparished areas are defined, unfortunately Skinsmoke hasn't been active since 2018.

Do you think we should still have the 2021 population and surrounding parishes mentioned at the end just like Hereford and Worcester#Abolition mentions the 2019 population?

I guess we can still mention it like at Letchworth#Governance. I guess here and on Commons the categorization will still be used unless here per WP:EPON we want to remove the categories from Category:Unparished areas in Hertfordshire but keep the articles. I'd suggest if we want to do that it should go to CFD and a CFD to delete the unparished areas on Commons didn't gain consensus.

My edit summary may have been factually incorrect but as I noted some sources like the parish map in Panfield do make reference to it but I guess like the point you made about Derbyshire that is just one source.

I guess now if a parish called "Braintree" is formed we would move the content to Braintree and Bocking Urban District and redirect "Braintree and Bocking" back to Braintree. Crouch, Swale (talk) 22:29, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks @Crouch, Swale. I don't see the modern population of unparished areas as particularly important. The "what if" population for Hereford and Worcester is fairly harmless as a passing observation. For some unparished areas (perhaps the former Spalding Urban District / South Holland unparished area) a passing comment on the fact that the unparished area of the district which corresponds to the former Spalding Urban District has a population of X would equally be fairly harmless. However, as we saw at Worcester, where an urban area has grown significantly since 1974 the unparished population is prone to mislead and I'd therefore advise against including it in those cases. Likewise I wouldn't want people to start trying to disaggregate or create their own unparished area populations by summing wards or whatever.

We can certainly still mention unparished areas in governance sections, we just need to choose our phrasing carefully. Letchworth is an unparished area, but as part of the wider unparished area of North Hertfordshire rather than having official boundaries separating a "Letchworth unparished area" from neighbouring Baldock and Hitchin unparished areas.

I hadn't thought to change the categories - my feeling is people look to the text of articles to explain what a place is rather than any category. It's therefore how we word these things in articles that I was particularly trying to get clarified. I also don't mean to criticise your work – I have absolutely no doubt that your edits on this were in good faith and well-intentioned. Stortford (talk) 18:11, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

@Stortford: The relevance for the population is that its useful to state the current population of the area as unlike Hereford and Worcester there is at least still a point/argument that it still exists even though we have decided not to generally treat them this way given as noted a map in Panfield makes reference to the "Braintree and Bocking" unparished area while "Hereford and Worcester" doesn't seem to exist at all apart from some legacy organizations. Indeed in the case of Worcester the boundaries of the old district are smaller than the current settlement but this is a case of a district/unparished area without a settlement with the same name.

That's fine, I had relied on what Skinsmoke told me and UKBMD as a source. I reached out on you're talk page to ask about Braintree and Bocking so I was asking for feedback on it and you probably sooner or later would have found my edits to unparished areas anyway. Consensus can change and at least now on Wikipedia we have a consensus to be careful about how we describe them even if that wasn't previously the case so we need to go along with that consensus until something changes, perhaps we will find a source saying what was claimed but for now we will need to go along with this consenus, thanks. Crouch, Swale (talk) 20:11, 18 September 2023 (UTC)