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[email protected] · December 30th 09, 07:57 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In article , (Roland
Perry) wrote:

In message , at
07:06:15 on Wed, 30 Dec 2009, remarked:
Royston used to straddle the border of Cambridgeshire
and Hertfordshire. The border was redrawn round it in the nineteenth
century.

That counts as "fairly recent" (in my centuries-old timeline)!

(Last time we discussed this, did we come up with a date for this
boundary change?)

The establishment of county councils in 1889 probably. A lot of county
boundary anomalies were sorted out then.

As Wikipaedia puts it: "The boundaries of the counties were to be those
used for parliamentary purposes, adjusted to include urban sanitary
districts on county borders within a single county." The same article
mentions Newmarket as an urban sanitary district which lay in more than
one county and which was given to Suffolk (because it contained largest
part of the district's population at the 1881 census).

It doesn't mention Royston however. I suspect it hadn't developed
enough to be an urban sanitary district before then.

It seems that the former Royston USD may have been too big to fully
incorporate in either one county or the other, and half of it ended
up as the Melbourn District, within Cambridgshire. The other half
may have been lumped into Ashwell for a few years, before gaining
'independence'.

More likely they were rural sanitary districts. A number of rural
districts straddling county boundaries were divided between them.

--
Colin Rosenstiel