Is a town still classed as a town if there are no shops and pubs?

Angilion said:
Which London? There's so much of it that it covers everything from appalling crap hole to peaceful (and ludicrously expensive) luxury.

Also, where is London? The borders are quite arbitrary nowadays - you can travel 50 miles in the same urban area with different parts having different names. Is that one city or different towns and cities because reasons?
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I suppose you'd have to first make the distinction between City and Greater.
London contains two cities (London and Westminster) but Greater London is made up of boroughs (excluding City of London).
 
I had always assumed that the classification worked liked evolving pokemon, only with population size instead of XP.

Villagling --> Mediutown --> Citynormous
 
ScoTTyBEEE said:
Bermondsey? There's little else there except chavs and dog doodah.
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Nice try, but very few chavs in Bermondsey, try Deptford, Peckham, and Walworth, and considering that I make a regular circuit of Southwark Park for exercise, and/or walk to Hays Galleria and back from Rotherhithe Tunnel after going round the park, I don’t often see any doggy doo doo either.
 
Jean-F said:
Nice try, but very few chavs in Bermondsey, try Deptford, Peckham, and Walworth, and considering that I make a regular circuit of Southwark Park for exercise, and/or walk to Hays Galleria and back from Rotherhithe Tunnel after going round the park, I don’t often see any doggy doo doo either.
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I must say, Bermondsey was chavvy as heck when I lived there in 2002, but like more and more grotty parts, it has gentrified (at least nearer the river).
 
The smallest city in the UK is St Davids in Wales, with a population of <2,000. I was slightly surprised that Truro, the 'county town' of Cornwall, which is also a City, is smaller than my 'local' small City of Ely.

Having a Cathedral is the main qualification for being a City, but by no means the only only one; for example Cambridge only gained City status via Royal Charter in 1951..

Regarding what qualifies a place as a hamlet/village/town, the definitions are very vague; the UK government's Planning Policy Statement 3: Housing does not do so on mere population size, but takes into account provision of services...

As for the 'death of the high street'; it is very real in smaller towns. Where I live (St Ives, Cambs) the high street there, and also in the nearest 'larger town' (Huntingdon) the town centres are basically a Greggs, a Poundland, a W H Smith and a raft of Charity Shops. Unfortunately the rent and tax breaks afforded to Charity Shops helps fuel their growth, pushing out 'proper shops' who cannot compete. I particularly have an issue with Charity Shops which start selling brand new items, such as the BHF furniture shops...
 
Rossi~ said:
I suppose you'd have to first make the distinction between City and Greater.
London contains two cities (London and Westminster) but Greater London is made up of boroughs (excluding City of London).
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But most cities don't have a split like that. London's cities-within-a-city thing is a result of its history. You don't, for example, have a very small City of Mumbai within Greater Mumbai. It's all Mumbai.

As well as that, the idea of Greater London (i.e. London) is an arbitrary division anyway. It's just some lines drawn on a map and a declaration that this side is London and this side isn't because that's where the imaginary line is. It's just a political boundary, the area officially administered in some way as being London. With that way of defining the boundaries of a city, there are cities that are bigger than some countries and which consist mostly of countryside, i.e. not an urban area at all. Chongqing administrative district, for example, covers over 80,000 km^2, over 1,000 towns and over 30 million people. It's all within one line on a map, the area administered by Chongqing, so all of it is the city of Chongqing by that definition of "city". But most of the area is countryside. If it was in Europe, it would be called a country - a large area of land containing a big urban area, lots of smaller urban areas, lots of countryside, farms, roads, infrastructure, etc.

I think it's too fuzzy a thing to make any distinction first, that it's a question to which there is no right answer. It would be tempting to define a city as a contiguous urban area, i.e. to define a city by the essential criteria of what makes a city different to not-a-city. But that definition has its own problems because many such areas contain distinctly different areas with different local governments and in quite a few cases different national governments as they're in different countries. For example, is Tijuana-San Diego one city? Does the porosity of the international border within a contiguous urban area matter? There's a city/cities in Europe in which a person changed their nationality by hiring a builder to move their front door to a different position in the front room of their house. No joke - there are a number of homes spanning that exremely porous border and nationality is defined by which country the front door of the house opens into. Move the door a metre and you've changed nationality.
 
Angilion said:
But most cities don't have a split like that. London's cities-within-a-city thing is a result of its history. You don't, for example, have a very small City of Mumbai within Greater Mumbai. It's all Mumbai.

As well as that, the idea of Greater London (i.e. London) is an arbitrary division anyway. It's just some lines drawn on a map and a declaration that this side is London and this side isn't because that's where the imaginary line is. It's just a political boundary, the area officially administered in some way as being London. With that way of defining the boundaries of a city, there are cities that are bigger than some countries and which consist mostly of countryside, i.e. not an urban area at all. Chongqing administrative district, for example, covers over 80,000 km^2, over 1,000 towns and over 30 million people. It's all within one line on a map, the area administered by Chongqing, so all of it is the city of Chongqing by that definition of "city". But most of the area is countryside. If it was in Europe, it would be called a country - a large area of land containing a big urban area, lots of smaller urban areas, lots of countryside, farms, roads, infrastructure, etc.

I think it's too fuzzy a thing to make any distinction first, that it's a question to which there is no right answer. It would be tempting to define a city as a contiguous urban area, i.e. to define a city by the essential criteria of what makes a city different to not-a-city. But that definition has its own problems because many such areas contain distinctly different areas with different local governments and in quite a few cases different national governments as they're in different countries. For example, is Tijuana-San Diego one city? Does the porosity of the international border within a contiguous urban area matter? There's a city/cities in Europe in which a person changed their nationality by hiring a builder to move their front door to a different position in the front room of their house. No joke - there are a number of homes spanning that exremely porous border and nationality is defined by which country the front door of the house opens into. Move the door a metre and you've changed nationality.
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I think decently contiguous urban area with a single identifiable government is entirely justified.

London is awkward still, but, for the most part the GLA is this identifier.

A lot places in the union UK suffer without similar authorities, it helps with planning out an urban area without separate councils all vying for their peicemeal theft from the cities proper economic centre. The councils are still useful as you still need local presence, but they really need a middle ground between them and parliaments.
 
Jean-F said:
Nice try, but very few chavs in Bermondsey, try Deptford, Peckham, and Walworth, and considering that I make a regular circuit of Southwark Park for exercise, and/or walk to Hays Galleria and back from Rotherhithe Tunnel after going round the park, I don’t often see any doggy doo doo either.
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Must take a long time tapping that white stick infront of you.
 
JonnyT said:
The smallest city in the UK is St Davids in Wales, with a population of <2,000. I was slightly surprised that Truro, the 'county town' of Cornwall, which is also a City, is smaller than my 'local' small City of Ely.

Having a Cathedral is the main qualification for being a City, but by no means the only only one; for example Cambridge only gained City status via Royal Charter in 1951..

Regarding what qualifies a place as a hamlet/village/town, the definitions are very vague; the UK government's Planning Policy Statement 3: Housing does not do so on mere population size, but takes into account provision of services...

As for the 'death of the high street'; it is very real in smaller towns. Where I live (St Ives, Cambs) the high street there, and also in the nearest 'larger town' (Huntingdon) the town centres are basically a Greggs, a Poundland, a W H Smith and a raft of Charity Shops. Unfortunately the rent and tax breaks afforded to Charity Shops helps fuel their growth, pushing out 'proper shops' who cannot compete. I particularly have an issue with Charity Shops which start selling brand new items, such as the BHF furniture shops...
Click to expand...

Having a Cathedral was the main requirement in order to become a city. But it hasn't been a consideration for well over a century now. The vast majority of towns which gained a Cathedral in the 20th Century remained towns (e.g. Bury, Guildford, etc.). Alongside this, we gained a bunch of cities that don't have Cathedrals (Hull, Stoke, Wolverhampton, etc.).
 
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