A Bonus Email, Concerning St Albans, and Other Similar Places

A reminder of an event this evening, cleverly disguised by some content.

Actual content below. First: tonight, as part of my intensive schedule of basking in A History of the World in 47 Borders having been selected as a book of the month by both Waterstones and Foyles, I will be at Waterstones in St Albans reading from, talking about and signing the book.¹

I’ll be accompanied by my friend Phil Tinline, whose brilliant new book Ghosts of Iron Mountain tells the story of a work of anti-war satire which fooled people just a bit too successfully – and thus explores how the US ended up trapped in a nightmare of conspiracy theories. I’ve just finished reading it, and I am frankly in awe of its scope.

If you’re in or around St Albans, why not come along and see us? The title says “An Evening With Jonn Elledge” – LOL – because they booked me first, but we’re doing it as a double act and discussing both books.

If you’re not in or around St Albans – and if we’re honest with ourselves, most people aren’t – then here are some other options:

Friday 4 April: Interintellect Salon

Thursday 10 April: Waterstones London Piccadilly (with Rob Hutton)

Sunday 13 April: Guildford Literary Festival

Monday 14 April: Waterstones Liverpool (with Neil Atkinson)

Saturday 26 April: Waterstones Romford²

Tuesday 29 April: Waterstones York

Tuesday 6 May: Foyles London Charing Cross (with Dorian Lynskey)

Thursday 8 May: Stratford Literary Festival

Tuesday 20 May: The Hop Inn, Hornchurch³

Since you’ve been good enough to read and/or scroll through all that, and since I hate sending emails that are literally just promo, and since the main thing I know about St Albans is that it’s officially a city despite being tiny, here are some things I made earlier…

Yes, St Albans is officially described as a city, and no, I don’t care

Originally published October 2021.

The largest city in England is Birmingham. It is followed, in this order, by Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford and Manchester. The second smallest is Wells, on the edge of Somerset’s Mendip Hills, home to just over 10,000 people.

The smallest of all is London.

Those last paragraphs are, officially, true. Therein lies the problem.

Does having a cathedral make St Albans a city? Image: David Marchant/CC BY 3.0.

It’s over a decade now since I started Having Opinions About Cities on a professional basis. In that time I have tweeted thoughts about cities as varied as Reading and Middlesborough, Bournemouth and Huddersfield. And, over and over, those tweets have received a predictable stock response: “That isn’t a city, though.”

This is annoying for several reasons, but the most annoying of them all is that it is, technically, correct. The UK officially has precisely 76 cities: read Wikipedia’s list, and you will not find any of the places I listed in the previous paragraph. You will, however, find such bustling urban centres as St Davids (pop. 1841), in the far west of Wales...

Google Maps of St David’s.

...or St Asaph (pop. 3,355), in that country’s opposite corner:

Google Maps of St Asaph.

To give you a sense of quite how enormous these megalopolises are, here’s a chunk of Manchester of the same size and shown at the same scale:

Google Maps of Manchester.

That’s not even – not even close to – the entire city centre. Meanwhile St Davids is the sort of place that would have to conduct a major programme of housebuilding and public works if it wanted to be taken seriously as a village. Yet the British state, in all its infinite wisdom, has looked at it, and decided, “Yep, that’s a city, right enough”.

How did this happen? As with so many of the more obviously ridiculous aspects of the British state, much of it comes down to the awkward interaction between centuries of medieval precedent, the Industrial Revolution, and the political ambitions of Henry VIII.

Once upon a time, city status was an informal sort of affair: a royal charter wasn’t seen as granting city status, merely as recognising it. This meant that settlements that happened to have grown up around cathedrals were treated as cities because, well, they always had been.

Then the Reformation happened and, to consolidate his hold on the church, in the early 1540s everyone’s favourite morbidly obese Tudor wife-murderer created six new cities via letters patent. Now, unless it had been considered one for centuries, a settlement needed government permission to count as a city.

For the next 300 years or so this wasn’t a problem, but then a load of people started descending on the new industrial centres in search of jobs. In the century after 1811, the population of Manchester grew by a factor of seven. Suddenly, city status wasn’t about recognising something that had always been the case, it was about acknowledging that a place had arrived. So the boom towns began petitioning the government.

It was in an attempt to impose some order on this that, in 1907, the Home Office established three criteria necessary for a place to count as a city – a minimum population of 300,000, a good record of local government, and a “local metropolitan character”. True to form, however, no one in government bothered to tell anybody else what those criteria were, and anyway immediately started ignoring them.

Changing local authority boundaries confused things further. St Davids lost its city status in 1886, when a local government reorganisation meant it officially ceased to exist, and so there was nobody to complain. The same happened to Armagh. Both got the status back in 1994, “in recognition of their important Christian heritage and their status as cities in the last century”, even though St Davids is only as a community council – little more than a parish – and Armagh exists only in the title of the (deep breath) Armagh City, Banbridge & Craigavon Borough Council. Other places haven’t been so lucky. Rochester lost its own city status by accident in 1998 when it too ceased to exist and became part of the new borough of Medway. It’s still not allowed to use the title.

This isn’t the only way council boundaries have proved problematic. The reason that the list of the largest cities in England at the start of this article looks so weird is because it’s counting the population of fairly arbitrarily defined council areas, not anything one might experience as a city. London is officially the smallest city in England by population because the London in question is the City of London where only around 7,000 people live. Greater London is not officially a city at all. Neither is Greater Manchester. Meanwhile chunks of Cumbrian countryside are part of the City of Carlisle. It’s madness.

Size isn’t the only factor that should determine what counts as a city, of course. Nearly 3,000 years of human history passed before anywhere met that Edwardian minimum of 300,000 people (the first was probably Alexandria, in Egypt, around 200BCE; it’s on page 41 of my first book). And surely there is a case that Truro, the capital of Cornwall, has a better claim than Southend, essentially a coastal outpost of London, even though the latter is around 15 times the size. But if the residents of St Davids officially live in a city, while those of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets (hello) do not, surely we can agree that something’s gone wrong.

So: yes, officially, St Asaph is technically a city, while Middlesbrough technically isn’t. But this is not an argument against the city-ness of Middlesbrough: it’s an argument against the entire, nonsensical edifice of official city status.

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that the number of official cities given in this article, 76, does not match the date on which it was published, 2021. I’ve updated it to take account of those that were added later: Southend, given the title in 2022 to commemorate its murdered MP Sir David Amess; and six more added in 2023 for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.

Before that happened I speculated as to which might make the grade:

Every place applying for official city status, ranked in order of plausibility

Originally published January 2022.

“Winning city status can provide a boost to local communities and open up new opportunities for people who live there,” reads a Department for Culture, Media & Sport press release quietly shoved out over Christmas, “as is the case with previous winners Preston and Perth where the local economies benefited from their improved national and global standing.”

I think, when it comes to the improved global standing of Preston and Perth, the phrase we’re looking for is “citation needed”. The press release does include quotes from the chair of the Preston Business Improvement District about how brilliant city status has been, but since a) the Preston Business Improvement District was one of the prime movers in the campaign to win city status for Preston, and b) you can generally find someone to say most things if you tell them they might get their name in the papers, I’m not sure we can really class this as “evidence”, exactly.

Anyway, even if the whole thing is a complete waste of time and money, which it probably is, that hasn’t stopped more than three dozen different places applying for city status as part of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations next year. Some of them, weirdly, aren’t in the UK at all, because in what I can only assume is more global Britain nonsense, “British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies are also included for the first time”. This means that someone in the government genuinely had the thought, “If we make Gibraltar a city, perhaps no one will notice the collapse in cross-Channel trade.”

So who are the contenders for the shiny new “city of” label? And how ridiculous are they, exactly? Below I’ve ranked them from “should probably be a city already” to “no really who are you kidding here”.

Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire

You may sneer, but it’s the central settlement in a sizable urban area and has an up and coming Tory metro mayor. Strong candidate.

Bournemouth, Dorset

Half a million people live there or thereabouts: strange it’s not already a city in some ways.

Douglas, Isle of Man

An actual capital. Tiny (28,000, ish), but if the UK government is going to grant city status to places not actually in the UK, which apparently it is, then this must top the list.

Northampton, Northamptonshire

Pretty big (200k+), county town, why not really?

Medway, Kent

Rochester is the only place to ever actually lose city status due to administrative cock up (because when Medway was invented, Rochester, er, ceased to exist). The chance to correct this historic oversight probably looks pretty tempting.

Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire

Britain’s most successful new town, big, and growing fast. The city of the future! Okay, it’s a future no one seems to want! But in a world where city status was granted for sane reasons like “actual demographic or economic importance” it’d be a city already!!

Warrington, Cheshire

Was going to rank this lower, but it’s basically the exact same story as Milton Keynes so I realised this was just anti-northern bias on my part and shoved it up the list.

Wrexham, Clwyd

The lucky winners in 2012 included one apiece from England, Scotland and Wales (Chelmsford, Perth and St. Asaph), so this must be pretty plausible merely by virtue of being in Wales. Also, it’s not much smaller than nearby Chester.

St Andrews, Fife

By the same logic: somewhere from Scotland is probably going to get city status, why not the one at least some senior Tories were educated and/or played golf in? Is the fact that hardly anyone lives there really enough to counteract that?

Bangor, County Down

Biggest candidate in Northern Ireland, so pretty good shout. Only slight issue is that the (smaller) Bangor in Wales is already a city.

Stanley, Falkland Islands

Absolutely ridiculous idea, but tell me you can’t imagine the look on Nadine Dorries’ face as she announces it.

(A side note. Why on earth is this DCMS’ area of influence anyway? Wouldn’t this fit better in whatever they’re calling the local government/housing/levelling up sock drawer this week? That said, I approve of only letting Dorries near completely pointless bits of policy, so perhaps I should shut up.)

Dorchester, Dorset

Tiny and forgotten but sounds important (Dor-set, Dor-chester, geddit?), so would fit right in with such existing official cities as Durham and Ely.

Warwick, Warwickshire

See Dorchester.

Doncaster, South Yorkshire

Decent size, and government might smile on it for red wall reasons. Plausible.

Bolsover, Derbyshire

Less decent size – it’s about 10k, rather than 100k – but government might smile on it for red wall and/or trolling the Labour party reasons. Still plausible.

Livingston, West Lothian

One of Scotland’s more successful new towns, but an order of magnitude smaller than MK or Warrington. So plausible, but probably, no.

Colchester, Essex

One of the oldest settlements in these islands, which should make it a strong candidate, but Essex has already had two new cities in 10 years (the aforementioned Chelmsford and, last year, Southend). So seems unlikely.

Gibraltar, Gibraltar

On the one hand it’s ridiculous, on another it might trigger war with Spain, so you can see why this government would be tempted.

Dunfermline, Fife; Oban, Argyll and Bute; Greenock, Renfrewshire

We’re into the realm of places that are only on the list at all because somewhere from Scotland is going to make the list. But it’s probably not any of these is it, let’s be honest.

Coleraine, County Londonderry; Ballymena, County Antrim

Same, but with Northern Ireland. One of these might sneak over the line because the government decides it’s stupid to have two cities called Bangor.

Reading, Berkshire

Big, historic and important, so logically it should have city status already. But since it’s been rejected three times, it’s increasingly clear someone in Whitehall has a vendetta against it – which, to be fair, is very funny – so it ain’t happening.

Dudley, West Midlands

Personally I think it’d also be hilarious if the West Midlands – which is, let’s be honest, Greater Birmingham – was to get a fourth city. This would also mean a fairly sizeable city without a railway station (Dudley Port, bafflingly, is in Sandwell, just outside). But I don’t seriously expect anyone in government to share this view.

Blackburn, Lancashire

Big-ish, important-ish, but has made the critical error of continuing to vote Labour so let’s be honest this is not happening either is it.

Dumfries, Dumfries and Galloway

Wikipedia: “No positive information has been obtained of the era and circumstances in which the town of Dumfries was founded.” Says it all.

Boston, Lincolnshire

No.

Crewe, Cheshire

No, but with more trains.

Guildford, Surrey

Lol, no.

Goole, East Yorkshire

Where? No.

Crawley, West Sussex

Are you actually kidding me? It’s a few suburban streets next to an airport. Absolutely no chance.

Elgin, Moray

Sort out the marbles then we’ll talk. Til then: no.

Newport and Carisbrooke, Isle of Wight

Originally ranked this higher as I thought it was the Welsh one but turns out that’s already a city, so: nooooo.

Peel, Isle of Man

Obviously not, but it would be hilarious if Peel (pop. 5,000) got it in place of Douglas (pop. 28,000).

Alcester, Warwickshire

Not the county town, right next door to Shakespeare’s birthplace, who are you kidding? By this point in the list I don’t think even the people applying reckon they’re in with a shot, they’re just trying to get their names in the papers. Which brings us on to:

Marazion, Cornwall

Population: 1,400. This makes it smaller than St David’s, the current holder of the title “UK’s smallest city”, which is a veritable metropolis with a population of 1,600. Kudos to whichever parish councillor managed to get their village all those headlines, but why on earth is the DCMS cooperating with this nonsense?⁴

South Ayrshire, Ayrshire and Arran

This one isn’t even a settlement! It’s an entire council district! Why is it here? How could it possibly class as a city? The only one stupider is:

George Town, Cayman Islands

Okay, in some ways this isn’t ridiculous: it’s 40,000 people, it’s the largest settlement in any British overseas territory, it’s a hub of the global financial system. But come on. In her Platinum Jubilee year, surely even this government isn’t going to ask the queen to grant official city status to a place that exists almost entirely as a tax haven. Surely that’s too on the nose.

Oh who am I kidding, it’s way more likely than Reading.

The victors were all comfortably in the top half of my rankings:

• Bangor (10th)

• Colchester (17th)

• Doncaster (14th)

• Douglas (3rd)

• Dunfermline (19th)

• Milton Keynes (6th)

• Stanley (11th)

• Wrexham (8th)

...but two of those (Douglas and Stanley) are not technically in the United Kingdom so don't count towards the total listed above.

I hope that clears everything up.

Anyway, see you in St Albans, or elsewhere!

1. Yes I am doing this because I forgot to mention it in yesterday’s email, yes.

2. Yes I did email them purely because it’s my home town.

3. Yes it’s my step father’s favourite pub.

4. Sadly, DCMS unexpectedly changed the rules, so that places needed permission from their “primary authority” (no idea) to apply. Nobody in Marazion had thought to ask its primary authority, Cornwall, or indeed had ever heard the phrase “primary authority” before, so the bid was thrown out. Bummer.

Delightfully, though, I later received correspondence from one of the councillors involved which a) confirmed that the whole thing was a PR stunt intended to attract both headlines and visitors to the village, and b) it worked so ya boo sucks. Can’t say fairer than that.