The Association of British Counties provides resources to enable the use of the historic counties and promotes them through projects and campaigns.
Our resources include:
- Gazetteer of British Place Names – a comprehensive listing of the historic county of the cities, towns and villages of Britain. An interactive web map can also be found on the Gazetteer.
- Historic County Borders Project – providing Geospatial county border data in GoogleEarth (KMZ) and Shape formats.
- Historic Counties Postal Directory – a directory of the historic counties indexed by post town. The directory can be used to integrate counties into address data and look-ups;
- A set of factsheets including An introduction to the historic counties.
Our projects and campaigns include:
- Establishing county flags to promote and reaffirm a historic county’s identity. Over 50 county flags have now been registered and we hope in time that all the nation’s counties will raise one.
- Promoting the establishment and celebration of a “county day” for each of the historic counties.
- Working with local authorities, organisations and land owners to mark historic county borders and places of interest.
- Promoting the use of the historic counties as a basis for social, cultural and sporting purposes.
- Lobbying government for a change to local government terminology to make clear the distinction between the historic counties and local government units.
- Persuading the media, publishers, government, heritage and other organisations to use the geography of the historic counties for all suitable (i.e. non-administrative) purposes.
- Promoting the historic counties as tourist destinations and encouraging the tourism industry to do likewise.