Talk:List of civil parishes in England

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[edit] Sources

I'm trying to get at least two sources for every county/district - the Office for National Statistics has a complete list of English parishes and Welsh communities, and most (but not all) local authority websites have a list too. Any further independent sources would be welcome, as so far I've found a fair few inconsistencies re naming and town status. sjorford 13:53, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The ONS list has now been updated through to 31/12/04: available here. sjorford →•← 14:55, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Second thoughts on Wiltshire

I've decided that I've bitten off more than I can chew in trying to add the whole of Wiltshire in one go. I'm gradually working through the parishes in Kennet district, and I have already cross checked them against two sources; but I'm finding lots of inconsistencies needing research and resolution, not to mention lots of dab needed.

It is clear that it is going to take me a long time to get round to the other districts, and I'm concerned about the quality in the meantime. These are just taken straight from the ONS Excel spreadsheet, and I now know this has its limitations. So I have decided to relocate all the non-Kennet places here. Hopefully either I or someone else can resucitate given time. -- Chris j wood 18:42, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

North Wiltshire

Salisbury

West Wiltshire

[edit] Message for whoever took the merge message off

This page is already at 55 kilobytes which is much to long for a wikipedia article, and you haven't even got all the counties' places listed. Merging into the county listings at List of places in the United Kingdom is not only going to be easier, it's going to look better and it's going to be easier for other users to find the information you've uploaded once it's there. -- Graham ☺ | Talk 16:25, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Hey, I don't type that fast :-). I agree with the need to do something about the page size; and splitting into county level sub-articles as is done in List of places in the United Kingdom is probably a good idea. I would have no objection to someone doing that; if and when I ever finish the mamoth task I seem to have bitten off on Wiltshire I may do it myself. But I do not agree with merging a list of places with a list of civil parishes (which, IMHO, are not real places). See my intial comment below. -- Chris j wood 16:45, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Sorry I do type faster than the average human, general failing of mine. I know what you're going through: in December last year I set myself the task of providing a full list of the places in Bucks and then writing an article for every one. It certainly kept me busy in those long winter nights... -- Graham ☺ | Talk 16:48, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Merge with List of places in the United Kingdom?

User:Francs2000 has added the annotation:

This article or section should be merged with List of places in the United Kingdom

to this article. I disagree, so I've moved it here.

The reason I disagree is from my current experience in trying to catalogue the places in the Kennet District of Wiltshire. What I'm finding in doing this is that often isn't any easy one to one mapping between civil parishes (which are somewhat arbitrary and abstract government areas) and real places like towns, villages and hamlets.

Sometimes a parish covers multiple villages (eg. the civil parish of Broad Hinton and Winterbourne Bassett actually represents two places Broad Hinton and Winterbourne Bassett). Sometimes the parish has a different name to the place it covers (eg. the village is called Great Cheverell but the parish is called Cheverell Magna!). And of course many many places have no connection with civil parishes at all (eg. most city suburbs).

So I do believe there are two separate lists here, one of places and the other of civil parishes, and any attempt to merge them will lead to more confusion than it will solve. -- Chris j wood 16:31, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

OK I get your point, but you might want to consider splitting the page into lists of civil parishes in the individual counties to cut down on page size, and an explanation about the difference between a parish and a village, town, hamlet etc may also be in order. It may also be worth considering that a separate article about a parish from the article about the same village may be considered folly by other editors and users, and I can imagine some users in particular who may object to the amount of bandwidth that will take up. -- Graham ☺ | Talk 16:42, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Agreed (see above). Actually I'm only creating separate articles where I feel the two (village and parish) are so different that this makes sense, and of couse I cross-link in that case. Mostly (95%?) the two are similar enough to have a single article; and if names differ I fix that up with REDIRECTs and in-article texts. -- Chris j wood 16:51, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Just to add to that for the record. To a certain extent the decision as to whether to have separate articles to villages and parishes is a subjective one. Whilst I know the area reasonbly well, I certainly don't know each village and parish that well. I fully expect, and am comfortable with, later editors disagreeing and amending my decisions. One of my reasons for linking from the lists via redirect pages rather than directly, where names differ, is to enable such changes. Hopefully they will do this from a position of greater local knowledge than I. :-) -- Chris j wood 17:01, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Trust me I've done a lot of research in Buckinghamshire and feel I know various parishes inside out, but I still feel the information would be better off in the village articles (in Bucks at least). -- Graham ☺ | Talk 17:05, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I definitely think this shouldn't be merged, although there is still a lot of work to do on this list (which I will help with myself when I have more wikitime). I didn't actually realise how many parishes there were - I'm originally from Cannock Chase, with its grand total of eight - and was slightly shocked to discover that there are over 700 in North Yorkshire. So it should probably be split by county. sjorford 13:42, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Status

How about indicating the status of each Parish (i.e. Town or City? I wouldn't be great on this, just an idea.

I've started doing this on List of civil parishes in Cumbria, which I've split out from this article. sjorford 16:40, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Full list

I've put a partly wikified full list at User:Morwen/CPs. This needs going over in terms of formatting and wikilink checking. However, I am not as skeptical of this data (which is taken directly from the ONS list) as above - e.g. Broad Hinton and Winterbourne Bassett is not a civil parish, they are two grouped civil parishes. Morwen - Talk 18:57, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Town Status

Should there be a mention on this page that some parishes have declared themselves towns & a link to the list of towns with charters? I only ask because there is endless confusion on that list about the difference. By the way, is this list really still incomplete? Surely this top level list is complete even if some of the sub-lists are not? MGSpiller 23:30, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Map link

I have found http://www.election-maps.co.uk/ a very useful free site when researching parishes. It will show the current parish names and boundaries in blue, overlaid on OS maps of almost any scale, right up to 1:25 000. It is now absolutely unambiguous what villages are in the territory of Corsham Town Council. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 13:55, 10 October 2006 (UTC)