Friday 27 November 2015

When is a town not a town?

I live a few miles away from a rapidly growing settlement called Brough. I see it mentioned from time to time as a town in the local press, but I've always thought of it as a large village. It has been a settlement for a long time, it was a town, Peturia, when Rome ruled this area.

The idea of not knowing whether a place in England is a town or a village seems easy to resolve: does it have a town council or a parish council? Well in the case of Brough it is not quite so easy. The local council is a town council, but it covers both Elloughton and Brough and is called Elloughton-cum-Brough Town Council. It is not that uncommon to find a civil parish or town council with multiple settlements within its bounds, but the council is a town council, surely one of the settlements needs to be a town.

It is clear to me there are two settlements here. Road signs show both places sometimes in different directions, OS Locator shows the street names as streetname : Brough : Elloughton-cum-Brough and streetname : Elloughton : Elloughton-cum-Brough.

OS Open Names shows both places as populatedPlace: village. So is it possible to have a town council presiding over an area with two villages and no towns in it?

I've asked the Local Authority, who, after all, provide the data for OS Locator and OS Open Names, what they think.

The answer is a political hot potato at the moment, as Elloughton-cum-Brough town council have recently decided to spend £4000 on a mayoral-style chain for the head of the council. It seems he can legitimately call himself mayor after the town council made the appropriate change in 2011. That's a lot of money to spend on what some call trinkets at a time when there are council cuts elsewhere.

Edit:
The clerk to the Elloughton-cum-Brough has contacted me and kindly given me information about the process that resulted in the parish council becoming a town council. She also confirmed that both Brough and Elloughton are villages. That means that the town council area has two villages and no towns in it.