Talk:Eton, Berkshire

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According to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (places), the current administrative area should be used, not traditional. Since Eton is in the historical county of Berkshire, but administratively in Windsor and Maidenhead UA, I think it should be moved to Eton, Windsor and Maidenhead or maybe Eton, England (the naming conventions page is misleading, since Berkshire no longer exists as an administrative county). ( 23:31, 2 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Sorry, but I think you misread Wikipedia:Naming conventions (places). It actually says (my boldening):

Carried with 13 in favour, 2 against.: We should use the current, administrative, county. E.g. Eton is in Berkshire, not Buckinghamshire.

This approach is consistent with most local and national government literature, some private sector literature, will be familar to most readers and writers, and indeed the approach will apply even if boundaries change again. It is also easy for people to find out where a particular village is, as maps with administrative boundaries are freely available online. While historic county maps do exist, it is hard to find one with maps of modern urban areas and city and borough boundaries transposed against historic counties. It is also consistent with other encyclopedias such as the 1911 Encyclopedia, which specifically calls Cromarty a 'former county'.

We should mention historic counties in articles about places and in references to places in a historic context, but only as an afternote. If a place is a unitary authority and not administered by a county council, it is acceptable to use ceremonial counties as geographic references, as this is often more in line with common usage. As has been pointed out, it is not useful to state that "Luton is a town in the county of Luton".

I agree the example in the first para is misleading for the reason you state. But the Unitary Authority of Windsor and Maidenhead does not have county status (a few UAs do), and Eton is actually not in any administrative county. In these circumstances, the correct disambiguation, as expressed in the third para, is to use the current ceremonial county, and for Eton this is still Berkshire. This is by far the most consistent approach, because where a place is in an administrative county, it is almost certainly in a ceremonial county of the same name. So the three paras quoted above could pretty well be precied as always use the ceremonial county. -- Chris j wood 19:10, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Windsor Bridge

The bridge that links Windsor and Eton is only called 'Windsor Bridge' by the residents of Eton; to the residents of Windsor it is called Eton Bridge.

The article at http://www.thamesweb.co.uk/windsor/windsorbridges/winbridge.html seems to be written pretty well from a Windsor point of view, as indicated by the URL itself. And it calls the bridge Windsor Bridge throughout the text, and Windsor Town Bridge in the heading. No sign of it being called Eton Bridge. -- Chris j wood 19:23, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Also Google gives 721,000 hits for the search string "Windsor Bridge Berkshire" and only 61,000 hits for "Eton Bridge Berkshire". -- Chris j wood 19:28, 16 January 2006 (UTC)