We would like to wish all of our supporters a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year for 2025. As ever, it has been a pleasure and a privilege to champion our historic counties.
2024 was certainly a very busy year for ABC and for all those in the traditional county movement. We continue to make great progress, especially through the establishment and promotion of county flags and county days, through establishing new groups and social media sites promoting a particular county and through promoting the use of the historic counties as a fixed general-purpose geography – notably through the Gazetteer of British Place Names. The Historic Counties All Party Parliamentary Group was also re-established following the election.
The Government is proposing major local government reforms in England in 2025. This presents them with a golden opportunity to finally completely separate local government and historic counties – by stopping the practice of calling any local government area a ‘county’; by stopping the practice of describing any local authority as a ‘county council’; and by ending the mis-use of historic county names by some local authorities (e.g. ‘Lancashire County Council’, ‘Cambridgeshire County Council’, ‘Surrey County Council’, ‘Oxfordshire County Council’ etc.).
The Government should also take some specific steps to promote the importance of our historic counties to our history, heritage, geography and culture. It should update, expand and re-publish its Celebrating the Historic Counties of England – this time for the whole of the UK. It should return to appointing the lieutenancies to the historic counties. These measures would be to the benefit of both local government and the historic counties. You’ll be hearing a lot more from us on all this in the New Year.
For now, we present some highlights from around our counties in 2024.
