British waters

On the confusing habit of some cities to claim unexpected bits of river, estuary or sea.

It’s now less than four weeks until my new book A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines On Our Maps is published. Flattering quotes have been gathered, audiobook recorded, final edits put through. All there is left to do now is to not shut up about it for months on end, so you’ve all got that to look forward to.

Anyway: to celebrate the fact that the big day is approaching, here’s another chapter that didn’t make the final cut. This one, like this post about Cromartyshire, Scotland’s stupidest county from a month or so back, ultimately ended up on the cutting room floor because of my lovely editor’s sneaking suspicion that mainstream readers were probably less interested in the oddness of historic local government borders than I was.

If any of this latest essay seems familiar, it’s because elements of it started out life as a post on this very newsletter back in 2022…

In 2007, the Lord Mayor of the western English city of Bristol, a councillor by the name of Royston Griffey JP – this is, apparently, a real name – decided to perform the ancient custom of “beating the bounds”, a rite that involves walking the boundaries of his city and occasionally stopping to hit something with a stick. This sounds like an eccentric enough thing to do in and of itself – but to do it, Royston had to go to sea.

The reason the mayor had to do this – had to borrow a ship from the Royal Navy, no less – is because the official boundaries of Bristol are, even by the standards of these things, a trip. At its core is a lozenge shaped area, slightly wider from north to south than it is from east to west. The boundaries of many cities today officially include only a part of their modern conurbation, and Bristol is no exception: around much of its circumference, the city’s limits exclude its own suburbs. 

An official map of official Bristol. Image: Bristol City Council.

But then, suddenly, they don’t: the city lunges unexpectedly north west, for five miles along the north bank of the River Avon to the Severn Estuary at Avonmouth. That’s where things get really weird. Because then the boundaries turn south west, heading 20 miles out towards the Irish Sea, as far as the uninhabited islands of Flat Holm and Steep Holm: the city officially includes the entirety of the body of water known as the Bristol Channel. The result is that the city of Bristol has an organic-looking, land-based component, with a freakish angular growth hanging off it, giving it the appearance of some kind of mutation.

Bristol’s maritime extension goes back a very long way: it dates to at least to 1373, the year parts of Gloucestershire and Somerset were merged into the newfangled City and County of Bristol, a way of dealing with the awkward fact that one of the major cities of 14th century England was technically split between two counties and thus two sets of governing authorities. The logic of the boundary seems to have been that, by extending the city’s territory below the low-waterline and into open sea, England’s Parliament was giving the port city control of shipping in the channel. It may have been tied up with the port’s defence, too: at some points, at least, the two islands were fortified. (Today, they’re uninhabited nature reserves.)

Image: the Boundary Commission for England.

Even if there was a logic to the boundary back in the 14th century, however, it nonetheless feels strange when, in the 21st, the parliamentary constituency of Bristol North West technically includes a vast stretch of open sea, or when any ceremonial mayors who want to survey the full extent of their domain find they need a boat. So why do these medieval boundaries remain? Because, as with so many British constitutional oddities, there has never been any reason to reform them. France had a revolution and Napoleon to take a year zero approach to how to govern a modern, large-ish European state. In Britain, however, these things can simply trundle on forever, just as long as they’re not getting anyone’s way.

So it is that the eastern English city of Norwich, another of the boom towns of medieval England, still to this day has boundaries that extend 10 miles east along the River Yare. It only includes the river itself, however, and not either of its banks, giving maps of the city the approximate appearance of a tadpole. The reasons for this odd shape seem to lie in the city’s long-held right to charge duty on river traffic, so as to fund the dredging work required to keep an important transport artery navigable. 

Although these ancient oddities generally seem to feature water, not all of them involve the sea. Generally speaking, the boundaries between the City of London – the misleading name for the British capital’s ancient heart – and the other boroughs which line the Thames run right down the middle of the river. At two points, though, the borders of the City extend all the way to the South Bank, giving it a weirdly nobbly outline. These are the area’s two most venerable bridges (Blackfriars, which dates to 1769, and London, which only dates from 1973 but is the latest in a line of predecessors dating all the way back to the Romans’ arrival in 43AD) – and their upkeep, unlike that of their upstart neighbours, has always been the City’s job. 

Image: Wikipedia.

A few miles downriver, there’s more. For most of the city’s history, the County of Kent, which was generally happy minding its own business on the southern bank of the Thames, insisted on extending across it into two patches of what you’d naturally have assumed to be the neighbouring county of Essex. This arrangement persisted even after 1889, when the Kentish district of Woolwich was incorporated into the new fangled County of London, but the Essex district of East Ham, across the water, was not: for most of the 20th century, you’d find two tiny patches of Kent-flavoured London in the Essex marshes on the north bank, separated from the rest of the capital by a massive great river. It was like the city was hanging on by its fingertips. 

Kent north of the river. Image: Wikishire. 

Even by the standards of these things, this arrangement seems to date back a long way. The Domesday Book of 1086 showed that the same Norman landlord, Hamo, the Sheriff of Kent, held land on both sides of the Thames as part of the manor of Woolwich. We can presumably credit the nine century existence of what was variously described as “Kent in Essex”, “Woolwich in Essex” or “detached Woolwich” to Hamo’s desire to personally nab all the revenue generated by the ancient ferry. The oddity wasn’t ironed out until 1965, when a sizeable chunk of Essex became part of a much bigger Greater London, and the ancient manor of Woolwich was finally divided into two separate boroughs along the rather hefty barrier of the river.

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Other oddities are rather more recent. The borough of Torbay, a seaside conurbation in Devon, includes within its boundaries much of the bay in question. Is this something to do with the ancient fishing rights of Torre Abbey? Connected, somehow, with the bay’s function as naval anchorage during the Napoleonic War? Neither: the independent local government researcher Alistair Simpson instead traced it to the Tor Bay Harbour Act 1970.

The similar extensions of the cities of Brighton & Hove, on England’s south coast, and Aberdeen, in Scotland’s north east, seem to date to the Brighton Marina Act 1968 and Aberdeen Harbour Act 1960 respectively. “In both cases,” writes Simpson, “my understanding was the local council wanting to build something out at sea, but not technically being allowed to because they didn’t own the ‘land’.” Then again, an equally plausible explanation for some of this stuff is that someone made a misleading map and before anyone noticed it was all over the internet. It’s hard to be sure.

To end where we came in, remember those two uninhabited islands which mark the farthest reach of Bristol’s maritime authority? The southernmost one of the pair, Steep Holm, is – despite being 23 miles from the city – technically a part of Bristol. The other, Flat Holm, is not: the border reaches it, then sort of bounces off.

Why isn’t Flat Holm in Bristol? Because it’s not in England. It’s in Wales.

I love ancient boundaries. I really do.

If you enjoyed that, and would like more of that sort of thing, why not pre-order the book? For one thing, pre-orders really help with things like bookshop placement; for another, it contains – as I can attest, having spent four days reading the entire book into a microphone – bloody loads of essays like this. Here’s the full contents list:

List of Maps xi

Introduction 1

PART ONE: HISTORIES

The Unification of Upper and Lower Egypt 11

The Great Wall of China and the Border as Unifier 15

Why is Europe Not a Peninsula in Asia? 22

The Roman Limes and the Power of the Periphery 28

The Legacies of Charlemagne 36

The Borders of Great Britain 44

Of Feudalism, Marquises, Margraves and Marcher Lords 52

The Open Borders Policies of Genghis Khan 58

Spain and Portugal Carve up the World 66

Holy, Roman and an Empire 72

Britain, Ireland and the Invention of Cartographic 

Colonialism 80

The Much Misunderstood Mason–Dixon Line 87

The Local Government Reforms of Emperor Napoleon I 96

The American Invasion of Mexico 103

The Schleswig-Holstein Business 108

‘. . . Where No White Man Ever Trod’ 114

The Sudan–Uganda Border Commission 122

European Nationalism and the United States of 

Greater Austria 127

Britain and France Carve up the Middle East 135

The Partition of Ulster 142

The Partition of India 147

The Iron Curtain and the Division of Berlin 156

PART TWO: LEGACIES

Königsberg/Kaliningrad, Eastern Germany/Western Russia 165

The Strange Case of Bir Tawil 172

The Dangers of Gardening in the Korean DMZ 177

China’s Nine-dash Line and Its Discontents 185

The Uncertain Borders Between Israel and Palestine 192

The Siamese Twin Towns of Baarle-Hertog and 

Baarle-Nassau 200

The US–Canada Border, and the Trouble with Straight Lines 205

Some Places Which Aren’t Switzerland 211

Some Notes on Microstates 217

City Limits 223

The Curse of Suburbia and the Borders of Detroit 230

Washington, DC and the Square Between the States 236

Borders from a Land Down Under 243

Some Accidental Invasions 251

Costa Rica, Nicaragua and the ‘Google Maps War’ 256

The Mapmaker’s Dilemma 261

PART THREE: EXTERNALITIES

A Brief History of the Prime Meridian 267

Some Notes on Time Zones 275

A Brief History of the International Date Line 282

Of Maritime Boundaries and the Law of the Sea 288

Some Notes on Landlocked Countries 295

How the World Froze Territorial Claims in Antarctica 299

The Other, Bigger, More Musical Europe 307

Boundaries in the Air 313

The Final Frontier 318

Conclusion: The End of the Line 325

Sources and Further Reading 329

Acknowledgements 345

Index 347

The book is out in the last week of April. If you like the sound of it, you can buy it here. Alternatively…