Expert Search

Our home page allows simple searching by placename and postcode. Here you can widen searches by using wild-cards or looking for sound-alikes, and narrow searches by specifying the county or nation. You can directly search for administrative units or for descriptions from historical gazetteers:

 

Name:
Search type:
Region:

  • Searches can include asterisks ('*') as wild cards to match characters you are not sure of, or you can try including names that sound like the name you are looking for.
  • Wild card and 'sound alike' searches can return very large numbers of matches, so consider specifying region and/or type. These searches can also be slow!
  • Several different kinds of county have been used in the British Isles over the last 200 years, as defined in our gazetteer of administrative units, but we use ancient counties when defining 'places'.

Our gazetteer of places was created especially for A Vision of Britain through Time, and aims to include all towns and all villages of any size. It draws on our gazetteer of administrative units, as well as our historical maps and descriptive gazetteers, and includes every settlement that gave its name to any of the following:

  • All Ancient Parishes, Civil Parishes that existed in 1911, and all Irish and Scottish parishes.
  • All local government districts that existed between 1894 and 1974, and all the slightly earlier sanitary districts.
  • All Poor Law Unions and Registration Districts, and almost all Registration sub-Districts.
  • All Parliamentary Constituencies.

Each place can be found using any of the names we have linked to it, including the names of associated administrative units, names given in historical gazetteers, and names used by historical travel writers.

 

Name:
Search type:
Region:
Entry type:

  • Searches can include asterisks ('*') as wild cards to match characters you are not sure of, or you can try including names that sound like the name you are looking for.
  • Wild card and 'sound alike' searches can return very large numbers of matches, so consider specifying region and/or type. These searches can also be slow!
  • Searching here by nation or county is smart: it understands the polyhierarchic structure of our underlying database. For example, if you specify a county, parishes will be returned if they were within the Ancient, Registration or Administrative County of that name.

Our administrative gazetteer combines:

  • Frederick Youngs' Guide to the Local Administrative Units of England (Royal Historical Society, 1979 and 1991)
  • Melville Richards' Welsh Administrative and Territorial Units (Univ. of Wales Press, 1969)
  • Richard Cheffins' Parliamentary Constituencies and their registers since 1832 (British Library, 1998)
  • Gazetteer of Scottish Administrative Units compiled from census reports and other sources
  • Baronies, Poor Law Unions, Parishes and "Towns" from Census of Ireland. 1851. General Alphabetical Index to the Townlands and Towns of Ireland

Our gazetteer also incorporates much additional research at the University of Portsmouth.


Political Areas

countries
 . . .  Country
 .  countries, 1st order divisions
 . . .  Region
 .  countries, 2nd order divisions
 . . .  County
 .  countries, 3rd order divisions
 . . .  Higher-level District
 . . .  Middle-level District
 . . .  Lower-level District
 .  countries, 4th order divisions
 . . .  Parish
 . . .  sub-Parish
 .  multinational entities
 . . .  World
 . . .  Continent
 . . .  Sub-Continent

Every administriative unit has a single Unit Type value to identify what kind of administrative unit it is. Within this can be type-specific Unit Status values. A given type of unit may hold more than one status value concurrently, or have none. Our system for classifying administrative units is designed as an extension to the Alexandria Digital Library's gazetteer Feature Type Thesaurus. We expanded their four terms for intra-state political units to our eight UK Geographical Levels.

Click on any of the levels for details of the Unit types we include within that level. Where there are a small number of units with a given type, you can access a complete listing of them. Note that some levels are unused when working only with British units.

 

Name:
Search type:
Region:
Entry type:

  • Searches can include asterisks ('*') as wild cards to match characters you are not sure of, or you can try including names that sound like the name you are looking for.
  • Wild card and 'sound alike' searches can return very large numbers of matches, so consider specifying region and/or type. These searches can also be slow!
  • You can also search the full text of the entries, and here you can search for any word, not just places names.

Our descriptive gazetteer combines the full text of four 19th century gazetteers, a total of over 90,000 entries:

  • John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England & Wales (1872)
  • Frances Groome's The Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland (1885)
  • Samuel Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837)
  • John Bartholomew's Gazetteer of the British Isles (1887)

Our typology of descriptive entries is based on the ADL Feature Type Thesaurus.