Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
39 Middlesex
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Somewhat ironically, the vast majority of the foreign tourists’ first experience of the UK, is in Middlesex.
Middlesex hasn't existed since 1965...
Middlesex hasn't been an administrative area since 1965, you mean. And Cookie wasn't talking about administrative areas...
For Middlesex, you mean Greater London.
No, I mean Middlesex. The area roughly equivalent to Greater London north of the Thames and west of the Lea, plus Staines.
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
Paris? Are you on crack? Doesn't even make the top 25 worldwide.
Cambridge is a small town, not a city.
New Orleans. Not a chance.
And New York may be impressive, but it's nowhere near as beautiful as Chicago.
Venice I will grant you. And I've never been to St Petersburg, so I'll you have that one.
I dont think Paris is that beautiful but certainly interesting and soulful . New Orleans similar . Edinburgh is more twee than beautiful and New York is more shock n awe than beautiful (also Las Vegas) - For beauty I think central european cities like Prague, Dubrovnik and Budapest are good candidates
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
39 Middlesex
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Somewhat ironically, the vast majority of the foreign tourists’ first experience of the UK, is in Middlesex.
Middlesex hasn't existed since 1965...
Middlesex hasn't been an administrative area since 1965, you mean. And Cookie wasn't talking about administrative areas...
For Middlesex, you mean Greater London.
No, I mean Middlesex. The area roughly equivalent to Greater London north of the Thames and west of the Lea, plus Staines.
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Not sure that the grassy, rolling sea of the Sussex Downs should come below Norfolk and Suffolk, which are mind-numbingly boring and flat.
What about the most soul-destroying road in the UK. I will make a strong case for the A47.
A47 goes through Rutland, one of the nicest parts of the country.
I’ll go with the M5 viaduct into Birmingham, or maybe the M6 viaduct into Birmingham.
M4 west, junctions 16 (Swindon) to 18 (Bath) is unremittingly dull.
The A47 is an incredibly dull road, especially either side of Kings Lynn, it used to have a fantastic greasy spoon cafe at Necton, now gone. However the A17 beats it for sheer depression. When i used to be allowed to drive by the health nazis and holidayed in Scotland there was simply nothing worse than homeward bound driving all day to reach Newark and having 2 hours of A17, A47 to go.........
The A130 is also a pointless shit of a road that serves only to take you from Chelmsford where you don't want to be to Rayleigh, Wickford or sodding Benfleet where nobody except Mark Francois wants to be
Oi! I was brought up in Benfleet. Mark François has nothing to do with Benfleet he's MP for Rayleigh.
And the Benfleet Downs and the Hadleigh Country Park were my playground as a youth!
To be fair though, Castle Point, which is now the District Council, has one of the lowest percentages of graduates as residents in the country. And I left, as did my graduate children and grandchildren!
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
39 Middlesex
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Somewhat ironically, the vast majority of the foreign tourists’ first experience of the UK, is in Middlesex.
Middlesex hasn't existed since 1965...
Middlesex hasn't been an administrative area since 1965, you mean. And Cookie wasn't talking about administrative areas...
I asked on the previous thread, but don’t think anyone responded:
With Sunak now at 9/1 (and seemingly lengthening by the hour), what price a Sunak withdrawal?
I speculated recently (today?) that Liz Truss might want to make Rishi an offer of a job in return for pulling out but unless there is a market for Boris to be replaced in August rather than September, it is probably not worth too much thinking time.
Incidentally, Betfair has £14,000 at 1.01 that Boris will go in 2022, which speaks to the time value of money or some such.
With inflation at 9%, that’s just about an inflation hedge if the contest concludes on Sep 5th.
Time value of money is now an important concept in long-term betting.
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
I'd put Staffs above Shropshire. It's got everything Shropshire has, but more variety and interest in it.
It's also got Stoke, but Shropshire has Telford.
Staffordshire's an odd one: the big perception of it is the M6, which doesn't show it at its best. West Staffs is like Shropshire; north east Staffs is the Peak District, both of which have much to recommend them. And I particularly like the area around Abbot's Bromley.
I'm sticking with my preferences as they are I like Shropshire a lot - but one of the beauties of a discussion like this is that most people will stick up for their local area - from which I infer that there is far more beauty worth discovering than even someone like me who is fairly well traveled in the UK has found.
Staffordshire is one of the most most underrated counties in England, but most people in the county would probably prefer it to remain that way because too many tourists often ruin an area.
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Not sure that the grassy, rolling sea of the Sussex Downs should come below Norfolk and Suffolk, which are mind-numbingly boring and flat.
What about the most soul-destroying road in the UK. I will make a strong case for the A47.
A47 goes through Rutland, one of the nicest parts of the country.
I’ll go with the M5 viaduct into Birmingham, or maybe the M6 viaduct into Birmingham.
I actually rather like the M5 viaduct out of Birmingham. It makes me happy. On the way south, it's 'M6 over - now holiday is starting'; on the way north it's 'M5 over - nearly home'. And the raised element gives a good view over the black country, which is actually more interesting than you think it is going to be, and certainly more pleasant than the M6 through the urban West Midlands.
Oh, *out* of Birmingham, the M5 viaduct is a lovely view of the countryside. But most of my experience was of doing a weekly commute from down South to up North on a Monday morning, and the M5/M6 junction was the inevitable pinch point no matter from which way it was approached. I ended up switching to the M42 and M6 Toll.
I’ll vote for the M6 toll as the best road in the country, the only thing that would make it better is raising the speed limit!
My wife and I see eye to eye on most things, but one of the few things guaranteed to cause a row (aside from any visit to Bent's Garden Centre near Leigh, and wrapping Christmas presents for the kids) is the M6 toll road. She loves it; I'm sure she's almost go out of her way to use it; I resent paying £5.50 for a saving which I generally reckon to be rather less than ten minutes. It's pleasant to drive down, but £5.50's worth of pleasant? One of those things I irrationally resent paying for. I'd happily spend £5.50 on wholly unneccessary cake.
£5.50? Do you get off at an intermediate junction or have you just not used it for a long time?
I think my answer is, it's worth it at rush hour, probably not otherwise. I would routinely save 15 minutes a day by using it to drive to work, which for the reduced rate of £2.90 I negotiated with them, plus the massively reduced stress, was definitely worth it.
I haven't used it for about a decade, and I don't think I've ever paid for it myself!
I once did some analysis of economic justifications for toll roads. If you use value of time measures, it's very difficult to set a toll low enough so that people are motivated to use it by the time saving but high enough so you can afford to build the road. You have to justify it on the qualitative experience "you won't save that much time, but pay us this sum and you'll find the next 20 minutes much more pleasant than you otherwise might".
The stories coming out of Ukraine today are rekindling my desire to see NATO engage directly in the war on Ukraine's side to bring it to a swift conclusion.
If it wasn't for the big stockpile of nuclear weapons that Russia has I think the rest of NATO would be halfway to liberating Crimea by this point.
We have nuclear weapons too. Why isn't Russia deterred from doing the stuff it's doing by our nuclear weapons?
I find it hard to believe that Russia would turn to nuclear weapons to defend its occupation of Melitopol. It's absurd. The amount of evil we're allowing to happen by being intimidated by the Russians is sickening.
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
39 Middlesex
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Somewhat ironically, the vast majority of the foreign tourists’ first experience of the UK, is in Middlesex.
Middlesex hasn't existed since 1965...
Middlesex hasn't been an administrative area since 1965, you mean. And Cookie wasn't talking about administrative areas...
For Middlesex, you mean Greater London.
No, I mean Middlesex. The area roughly equivalent to Greater London north of the Thames and west of the Lea, plus Staines.
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Not sure that the grassy, rolling sea of the Sussex Downs should come below Norfolk and Suffolk, which are mind-numbingly boring and flat.
What about the most soul-destroying road in the UK. I will make a strong case for the A47.
A47 goes through Rutland, one of the nicest parts of the country.
I’ll go with the M5 viaduct into Birmingham, or maybe the M6 viaduct into Birmingham.
M4 west, junctions 16 (Swindon) to 18 (Bath) is unremittingly dull.
The A47 is an incredibly dull road, especially either side of Kings Lynn, it used to have a fantastic greasy spoon cafe at Necton, now gone. However the A17 beats it for sheer depression. When i used to be allowed to drive by the health nazis and holidayed in Scotland there was simply nothing worse than homeward bound driving all day to reach Newark and having 2 hours of A17, A47 to go.........
The A130 is also a pointless shit of a road that serves only to take you from Chelmsford where you don't want to be to Rayleigh, Wickford or sodding Benfleet where nobody except Mark Francois wants to be
The A130 is a superb piece of road, actually, built far above spec, admittedly, but there you go.
I was one of the first people to drive the new section replacing the road through Rettendon on opening day in 2002. You could do some serious speed on it for sure. But its a road from Hell to other Hell through Wide Boy and Pie Hell
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
I'd have to put Dubrovnik in the top ten.
The foreign city I most enjoy is Naples.
I would put both Grenada in Spain and Urbino in Italy in my top ten. Both cities where you could almost imagine you are back in medieval times
I certainly wouldn't call either Cambridge or NYC beautiful. Fascinating perhaps but not beautiful.
Cambridge is quite beautiful, from certain angles. But it's still not a city, no matter what @ydoethur or the British government claims.
NYC is impressive, but not beautiful.
I'm intrigued. What's your definition of a city?
I have several requirements, which include (but are not limited to):
* Own airport with regular scheduled services * At least two parliamentary constituencies
So basically - there are hardly any cities in England? Because by your logic, Worcester, Hereford, Exeter, Lichfield, Canterbury, Carlisle, Gloucester, Stoke, Derby, Truro, Chester, Lancaster, Chichester, Salisbury, Bath, Wells, are not cities - and that's without even going into detail.
And I think outside England only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Belfast would qualify.
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
On your Montenegro rule, my favourite is Laon
Siena.
I remember a medieval (mostly) art gallery in Sienna - after seeing the 147th version of Madonna and Child by various artists, the physical shock of a Dürer was interesting....
Know the feeling. I traipsed around the Uffizzi until I knew I would scream if I saw one more Botticelli.
LONDON, July 29 (Reuters) - The UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) said on Friday it has been directed by the government to temporarily relax permitting conditions for coal-fired power stations in England during the winter period.
Everyone needs to ignore environmental bollocks, and find ways to get as much locally-produced power as possible over the winter. I’d be buying diesel generators, red diesel is going to be as cheap as grid power at some point.
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
39 Middlesex
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Somewhat ironically, the vast majority of the foreign tourists’ first experience of the UK, is in Middlesex.
Middlesex hasn't existed since 1965...
Middlesex hasn't been an administrative area since 1965, you mean. And Cookie wasn't talking about administrative areas...
For Middlesex, you mean Greater London.
No, I mean Middlesex. The area roughly equivalent to Greater London north of the Thames and west of the Lea, plus Staines.
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
I'd have to put Dubrovnik in the top ten.
The foreign city I most enjoy is Naples.
I would put both Grenada in Spain and Urbino in Italy in my top ten. Both cities where you could almost imagine you are back in medieval times
I certainly wouldn't call either Cambridge or NYC beautiful. Fascinating perhaps but not beautiful.
Cambridge is quite beautiful, from certain angles. But it's still not a city, no matter what @ydoethur or the British government claims.
NYC is impressive, but not beautiful.
I'm intrigued. What's your definition of a city?
I have several requirements, which include (but are not limited to):
* Own airport with regular scheduled services * At least two parliamentary constituencies
So basically - there are hardly any cities in England? Because by your logic, Worcester, Hereford, Exeter, Lichfield, Canterbury, Carlisle, Gloucester, Stoke, Derby, Truro, Chester, Lancaster, Chichester, Salisbury, Bath, Wells, are not cities - and that's without even going into detail.
And I think outside England only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Belfast would qualify.
I think you've proved my point.
Can you imagine a sentence starting "Beijing, in common with other great cities like Lichfield"?
The stories coming out of Ukraine today are rekindling my desire to see NATO engage directly in the war on Ukraine's side to bring it to a swift conclusion.
If it wasn't for the big stockpile of nuclear weapons that Russia has I think the rest of NATO would be halfway to liberating Crimea by this point.
We have nuclear weapons too. Why isn't Russia deterred from doing the stuff it's doing by our nuclear weapons?
I find it hard to believe that Russia would turn to nuclear weapons to defend its occupation of Melitopol. It's absurd. The amount of evil we're allowing to happen by being intimidated by the Russians is sickening.
Always amazes me the number of people who haven’t seen Dr Strangelove.
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
39 Middlesex
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Somewhat ironically, the vast majority of the foreign tourists’ first experience of the UK, is in Middlesex.
Middlesex hasn't existed since 1965...
Middlesex hasn't been an administrative area since 1965, you mean. And Cookie wasn't talking about administrative areas...
For Middlesex, you mean Greater London.
No, I mean Middlesex. The area roughly equivalent to Greater London north of the Thames and west of the Lea, plus Staines.
It doesn't exist as a county any more, sorry.
It doesn't have a county council. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And if we have to subdivide the country somehow for discussions of this sort, how would you propose to do it? I'm not going to list all 300-odd local government units. I'm not saying that local government has to equate to the counties which have been around since Norman times. (Though there are some arguments for that.) I just want an immutable set of subdivisions to use. And somewhere to identify with - I'm not going to start changing what my home county is every time there's a local government reorganisation.
Lots of places which don't have county councils still have other institutions which cover the territory of the historical county (more or less). The Cheshire RFU. The Chester Diocesan Guild of Change Ringers. And so on. Hell, Middlesex even has a rather famous cricket club associated with it.
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Not sure that the grassy, rolling sea of the Sussex Downs should come below Norfolk and Suffolk, which are mind-numbingly boring and flat.
What about the most soul-destroying road in the UK. I will make a strong case for the A47.
A47 goes through Rutland, one of the nicest parts of the country.
I’ll go with the M5 viaduct into Birmingham, or maybe the M6 viaduct into Birmingham.
M4 west, junctions 16 (Swindon) to 18 (Bath) is unremittingly dull.
The A47 is an incredibly dull road, especially either side of Kings Lynn, it used to have a fantastic greasy spoon cafe at Necton, now gone. However the A17 beats it for sheer depression. When i used to be allowed to drive by the health nazis and holidayed in Scotland there was simply nothing worse than homeward bound driving all day to reach Newark and having 2 hours of A17, A47 to go.........
The A130 is also a pointless shit of a road that serves only to take you from Chelmsford where you don't want to be to Rayleigh, Wickford or sodding Benfleet where nobody except Mark Francois wants to be
Oi! I was brought up in Benfleet. Mark François has nothing to do with Benfleet he's MP for Rayleigh.
And the Benfleet Downs and the Hadleigh Country Park were my playground as a youth!
To be fair though, Castle Point, which is now the District Council, has one of the lowest percentages of graduates as residents in the country. And I left, as did my graduate children and grandchildren!
My apologies! To be fair my scorn and despair is from a very unhappy time i lived in the area (Witham) in the early millenium. Essex and me, we were not a team.
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
I'd have to put Dubrovnik in the top ten.
The foreign city I most enjoy is Naples.
I would put both Grenada in Spain and Urbino in Italy in my top ten. Both cities where you could almost imagine you are back in medieval times
I certainly wouldn't call either Cambridge or NYC beautiful. Fascinating perhaps but not beautiful.
Cambridge is quite beautiful, from certain angles. But it's still not a city, no matter what @ydoethur or the British government claims.
NYC is impressive, but not beautiful.
I'm intrigued. What's your definition of a city?
I have several requirements, which include (but are not limited to):
* Own airport with regular scheduled services * At least two parliamentary constituencies
So basically - there are hardly any cities in England? Because by your logic, Worcester, Hereford, Exeter, Lichfield, Canterbury, Carlisle, Gloucester, Stoke, Derby, Truro, Chester, Lancaster, Chichester, Salisbury, Bath, Wells, are not cities - and that's without even going into detail.
And I think outside England only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Belfast would qualify.
I think you've proved my point.
Can you imagine a sentence starting "Beijing, in common with other great cities like Lichfield"?
No. Me neither.
You're right.
What person would be so utterly lost in taste as to compare Lichfield to a shitheap like Beijing?
Edit - and of course, by your criteria, Beijing isn't a city anyway, as it has no parliamentary constituencies...
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
I'd have to put Dubrovnik in the top ten.
The foreign city I most enjoy is Naples.
I would put both Grenada in Spain and Urbino in Italy in my top ten. Both cities where you could almost imagine you are back in medieval times
I certainly wouldn't call either Cambridge or NYC beautiful. Fascinating perhaps but not beautiful.
Cambridge is quite beautiful, from certain angles. But it's still not a city, no matter what @ydoethur or the British government claims.
NYC is impressive, but not beautiful.
I'm intrigued. What's your definition of a city?
I have several requirements, which include (but are not limited to):
* Own airport with regular scheduled services * At least two parliamentary constituencies
So basically - there are hardly any cities in England? Because by your logic, Worcester, Hereford, Exeter, Lichfield, Canterbury, Carlisle, Gloucester, Stoke, Derby, Truro, Chester, Lancaster, Chichester, Salisbury, Bath, Wells, are not cities - and that's without even going into detail.
And I think outside England only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Belfast would qualify.
I think you've proved my point.
Can you imagine a sentence starting "Beijing, in common with other great cities like Lichfield"?
No. Me neither.
Yes, but there's a qualifying word 'great' (meaning large) in there.
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
39 Middlesex
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Somewhat ironically, the vast majority of the foreign tourists’ first experience of the UK, is in Middlesex.
Middlesex hasn't existed since 1965...
Middlesex hasn't been an administrative area since 1965, you mean. And Cookie wasn't talking about administrative areas...
For Middlesex, you mean Greater London.
No, I mean Middlesex. The area roughly equivalent to Greater London north of the Thames and west of the Lea, plus Staines.
It doesn't exist as a county any more, sorry.
It doesn't have a county council. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And if we have to subdivide the country somehow for discussions of this sort, how would you propose to do it? I'm not going to list all 300-odd local government units. I'm not saying that local government has to equate to the counties which have been around since Norman times. (Though there are some arguments for that.) I just want an immutable set of subdivisions to use. And somewhere to identify with - I'm not going to start changing what my home county is every time there's a local government reorganisation.
Lots of places which don't have county councils still have other institutions which cover the territory of the historical county (more or less). The Cheshire RFU. The Chester Diocesan Guild of Change Ringers. And so on. Hell, Middlesex even has a rather famous cricket club associated with it.
Not a very good one though (albeit Gloucestershire can't talk right now)!
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
I'd have to put Dubrovnik in the top ten.
The foreign city I most enjoy is Naples.
I would put both Grenada in Spain and Urbino in Italy in my top ten. Both cities where you could almost imagine you are back in medieval times
I certainly wouldn't call either Cambridge or NYC beautiful. Fascinating perhaps but not beautiful.
Cambridge is quite beautiful, from certain angles. But it's still not a city, no matter what @ydoethur or the British government claims.
NYC is impressive, but not beautiful.
I'm intrigued. What's your definition of a city?
I have several requirements, which include (but are not limited to):
* Own airport with regular scheduled services * At least two parliamentary constituencies
So basically - there are hardly any cities in England? Because by your logic, Worcester, Hereford, Exeter, Lichfield, Canterbury, Carlisle, Gloucester, Stoke, Derby, Truro, Chester, Lancaster, Chichester, Salisbury, Bath, Wells, are not cities - and that's without even going into detail.
And I think outside England only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Belfast would qualify.
Cardiff is only hanging on to its airport due to Welsh government largesse. Does a vanity airport count?
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
39 Middlesex
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Somewhat ironically, the vast majority of the foreign tourists’ first experience of the UK, is in Middlesex.
Middlesex hasn't existed since 1965...
Middlesex hasn't been an administrative area since 1965, you mean. And Cookie wasn't talking about administrative areas...
For Middlesex, you mean Greater London.
No, I mean Middlesex. The area roughly equivalent to Greater London north of the Thames and west of the Lea, plus Staines.
Loathe as I am to bring us back to the topic, it's just occurred to me that the Vardys may well be having their legal fees bankrolled by The Sun/Rupert Murdoch, as it seems it was a Sun reporter that was highly instrumental in creating the situation which provided the tabloids with so much copy.
Anybody else had the same thought? It would certainly help explain why the couple pursued such a hopeless case to such lengths.
The stories coming out of Ukraine today are rekindling my desire to see NATO engage directly in the war on Ukraine's side to bring it to a swift conclusion.
If it wasn't for the big stockpile of nuclear weapons that Russia has I think the rest of NATO would be halfway to liberating Crimea by this point.
We have nuclear weapons too. Why isn't Russia deterred from doing the stuff it's doing by our nuclear weapons?
I find it hard to believe that Russia would turn to nuclear weapons to defend its occupation of Melitopol. It's absurd. The amount of evil we're allowing to happen by being intimidated by the Russians is sickening.
Always amazes me the number of people who haven’t seen Dr Strangelove.
Watched it many times. Have the DVD. Don't see its relevance to the subject at hand.
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
I'd have to put Dubrovnik in the top ten.
The foreign city I most enjoy is Naples.
I would put both Grenada in Spain and Urbino in Italy in my top ten. Both cities where you could almost imagine you are back in medieval times
I certainly wouldn't call either Cambridge or NYC beautiful. Fascinating perhaps but not beautiful.
Cambridge is quite beautiful, from certain angles. But it's still not a city, no matter what @ydoethur or the British government claims.
NYC is impressive, but not beautiful.
I'm intrigued. What's your definition of a city?
I have several requirements, which include (but are not limited to):
* Own airport with regular scheduled services * At least two parliamentary constituencies
So basically - there are hardly any cities in England? Because by your logic, Worcester, Hereford, Exeter, Lichfield, Canterbury, Carlisle, Gloucester, Stoke, Derby, Truro, Chester, Lancaster, Chichester, Salisbury, Bath, Wells, are not cities - and that's without even going into detail.
And I think outside England only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Belfast would qualify.
Cardiff is only hanging on to its airport due to Welsh government largesse. Does a vanity airport count?
Most of them are. After all, if we don't include vanity airports that's Newcastle upon Tyne, Nottingham and Sheffield out as well.
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Not sure that the grassy, rolling sea of the Sussex Downs should come below Norfolk and Suffolk, which are mind-numbingly boring and flat.
What about the most soul-destroying road in the UK. I will make a strong case for the A47.
A47 goes through Rutland, one of the nicest parts of the country.
I’ll go with the M5 viaduct into Birmingham, or maybe the M6 viaduct into Birmingham.
M4 west, junctions 16 (Swindon) to 18 (Bath) is unremittingly dull.
The A47 is an incredibly dull road, especially either side of Kings Lynn, it used to have a fantastic greasy spoon cafe at Necton, now gone. However the A17 beats it for sheer depression. When i used to be allowed to drive by the health nazis and holidayed in Scotland there was simply nothing worse than homeward bound driving all day to reach Newark and having 2 hours of A17, A47 to go.........
The A130 is also a pointless shit of a road that serves only to take you from Chelmsford where you don't want to be to Rayleigh, Wickford or sodding Benfleet where nobody except Mark Francois wants to be
The A130 is a superb piece of road, actually, built far above spec, admittedly, but there you go.
I was one of the first people to drive the new section replacing the road through Rettendon on opening day in 2002. You could do some serious speed on it for sure. But its a road from Hell to other Hell through Wide Boy and Pie Hell
I remember when the last section was opened, that to the Magic Roundabout just outside Benfleet. I drove down from North Essex to Basildon, where I then worked, and phoned my wife to say I've got to work in 40 minutes instead of the usual hour. It was one week before I retired!
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
39 Middlesex
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Somewhat ironically, the vast majority of the foreign tourists’ first experience of the UK, is in Middlesex.
Middlesex hasn't existed since 1965...
Middlesex hasn't been an administrative area since 1965, you mean. And Cookie wasn't talking about administrative areas...
For Middlesex, you mean Greater London.
No, I mean Middlesex. The area roughly equivalent to Greater London north of the Thames and west of the Lea, plus Staines.
Note in the lead it says "historic county", now making up part of the current Ceremonial County of Greater London.
Yes, if you look back to my original point, I said 'historical counties'.
See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historic_counties_of_England No less valid than ceremonial counties, and more widely understood. We all here know what we're talking about with the historic counties. Who here is 100% sure what the ceremonial counties are?
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
I'd have to put Dubrovnik in the top ten.
The foreign city I most enjoy is Naples.
I would put both Grenada in Spain and Urbino in Italy in my top ten. Both cities where you could almost imagine you are back in medieval times
I certainly wouldn't call either Cambridge or NYC beautiful. Fascinating perhaps but not beautiful.
Cambridge is quite beautiful, from certain angles. But it's still not a city, no matter what @ydoethur or the British government claims.
NYC is impressive, but not beautiful.
I'm intrigued. What's your definition of a city?
I have several requirements, which include (but are not limited to):
* Own airport with regular scheduled services * At least two parliamentary constituencies
So basically - there are hardly any cities in England? Because by your logic, Worcester, Hereford, Exeter, Lichfield, Canterbury, Carlisle, Gloucester, Stoke, Derby, Truro, Chester, Lancaster, Chichester, Salisbury, Bath, Wells, are not cities - and that's without even going into detail.
And I think outside England only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Belfast would qualify.
I think you've proved my point.
Can you imagine a sentence starting "Beijing, in common with other great cities like Lichfield"?
No. Me neither.
As opposed to the many cities in the US, with populations of a handful of thousand?
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
39 Middlesex
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Somewhat ironically, the vast majority of the foreign tourists’ first experience of the UK, is in Middlesex.
Middlesex hasn't existed since 1965...
Middlesex hasn't been an administrative area since 1965, you mean. And Cookie wasn't talking about administrative areas...
For Middlesex, you mean Greater London.
No, I mean Middlesex. The area roughly equivalent to Greater London north of the Thames and west of the Lea, plus Staines.
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Not sure that the grassy, rolling sea of the Sussex Downs should come below Norfolk and Suffolk, which are mind-numbingly boring and flat.
What about the most soul-destroying road in the UK. I will make a strong case for the A47.
A47 goes through Rutland, one of the nicest parts of the country.
I’ll go with the M5 viaduct into Birmingham, or maybe the M6 viaduct into Birmingham.
M4 west, junctions 16 (Swindon) to 18 (Bath) is unremittingly dull.
The A47 is an incredibly dull road, especially either side of Kings Lynn, it used to have a fantastic greasy spoon cafe at Necton, now gone. However the A17 beats it for sheer depression. When i used to be allowed to drive by the health nazis and holidayed in Scotland there was simply nothing worse than homeward bound driving all day to reach Newark and having 2 hours of A17, A47 to go.........
The A130 is also a pointless shit of a road that serves only to take you from Chelmsford where you don't want to be to Rayleigh, Wickford or sodding Benfleet where nobody except Mark Francois wants to be
The A130 is a superb piece of road, actually, built far above spec, admittedly, but there you go.
I was one of the first people to drive the new section replacing the road through Rettendon on opening day in 2002. You could do some serious speed on it for sure. But its a road from Hell to other Hell through Wide Boy and Pie Hell
I remember when the last section was opened, that to the Magic Roundabout just outside Benfleet. I drove down from North Essex to Basildon, where I then worked, and phoned my wife to say I've got to work in 40 minutes instead of the usual hour. It was one week before I retired!
It made it much quicker for me to fail to get people to invest in dodgy investment products in the post 9/11 economic wilderness certainly!
Loathe as I am to bring us back to the topic, it's just occurred to me that the Vardys may well be having their legal fees bankrolled by The Sun/Rupert Murdoch, as it seems it was a Sun reporter that was highly instrumental in creating the situation which provided the tabloids with so much copy.
Anybody else had the same thought? It would certainly help explain why the couple pursued such a hopeless case to such lengths.
May explain why 2 Scousers were so determined. The Echo is ecstatic.
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
I'd have to put Dubrovnik in the top ten.
The foreign city I most enjoy is Naples.
I would put both Grenada in Spain and Urbino in Italy in my top ten. Both cities where you could almost imagine you are back in medieval times
I certainly wouldn't call either Cambridge or NYC beautiful. Fascinating perhaps but not beautiful.
Cambridge is quite beautiful, from certain angles. But it's still not a city, no matter what @ydoethur or the British government claims.
NYC is impressive, but not beautiful.
I'm intrigued. What's your definition of a city?
I have several requirements, which include (but are not limited to):
* Own airport with regular scheduled services * At least two parliamentary constituencies
So basically - there are hardly any cities in England? Because by your logic, Worcester, Hereford, Exeter, Lichfield, Canterbury, Carlisle, Gloucester, Stoke, Derby, Truro, Chester, Lancaster, Chichester, Salisbury, Bath, Wells, are not cities - and that's without even going into detail.
And I think outside England only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Belfast would qualify.
I think you've proved my point.
Can you imagine a sentence starting "Beijing, in common with other great cities like Lichfield"?
No. Me neither.
You're right.
What person would be so utterly lost in taste as to compare Lichfield to a shitheap like Beijing?
Edit - and of course, by your criteria, Beijing isn't a city anyway, as it has no parliamentary constituencies...
Nor a charter from the monarch. Hell, it's not even a town.
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
I'd have to put Dubrovnik in the top ten.
The foreign city I most enjoy is Naples.
I would put both Grenada in Spain and Urbino in Italy in my top ten. Both cities where you could almost imagine you are back in medieval times
I certainly wouldn't call either Cambridge or NYC beautiful. Fascinating perhaps but not beautiful.
Cambridge is quite beautiful, from certain angles. But it's still not a city, no matter what @ydoethur or the British government claims.
NYC is impressive, but not beautiful.
I'm intrigued. What's your definition of a city?
I have several requirements, which include (but are not limited to):
* Own airport with regular scheduled services * At least two parliamentary constituencies
So basically - there are hardly any cities in England? Because by your logic, Worcester, Hereford, Exeter, Lichfield, Canterbury, Carlisle, Gloucester, Stoke, Derby, Truro, Chester, Lancaster, Chichester, Salisbury, Bath, Wells, are not cities - and that's without even going into detail.
And I think outside England only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Belfast would qualify.
I think you've proved my point.
Can you imagine a sentence starting "Beijing, in common with other great cities like Lichfield"?
No. Me neither.
Yes, but there's a qualifying word 'great' (meaning large) in there.
In the UK its a city if the queen says it is.
If we're comparing places in different countries, we need to have common standards. And, frankly, the Queen declaring something doesn't cut it.
So, I'm going with:
- own airport with regularly scheduled services - transit system with more than just buses - at least 4x the population of Bedford
If you don't like my conditions, then tough. They are reasonable and well reasoned.
It isn't, even in US terms Cambridge is a medium sized city.
US exit polls for example say big cities have a population over 500,000, medium sized cities a population from 50,000 to 500,000 and towns a population from 10,000 to 50,000.
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Not sure that the grassy, rolling sea of the Sussex Downs should come below Norfolk and Suffolk, which are mind-numbingly boring and flat.
What about the most soul-destroying road in the UK. I will make a strong case for the A47.
A47 goes through Rutland, one of the nicest parts of the country.
I’ll go with the M5 viaduct into Birmingham, or maybe the M6 viaduct into Birmingham.
M4 west, junctions 16 (Swindon) to 18 (Bath) is unremittingly dull.
The A47 is an incredibly dull road, especially either side of Kings Lynn, it used to have a fantastic greasy spoon cafe at Necton, now gone. However the A17 beats it for sheer depression. When i used to be allowed to drive by the health nazis and holidayed in Scotland there was simply nothing worse than homeward bound driving all day to reach Newark and having 2 hours of A17, A47 to go.........
The A130 is also a pointless shit of a road that serves only to take you from Chelmsford where you don't want to be to Rayleigh, Wickford or sodding Benfleet where nobody except Mark Francois wants to be
Oi! I was brought up in Benfleet. Mark François has nothing to do with Benfleet he's MP for Rayleigh.
And the Benfleet Downs and the Hadleigh Country Park were my playground as a youth!
To be fair though, Castle Point, which is now the District Council, has one of the lowest percentages of graduates as residents in the country. And I left, as did my graduate children and grandchildren!
My apologies! To be fair my scorn and despair is from a very unhappy time i lived in the area (Witham) in the early millenium. Essex and me, we were not a team.
I live not far from Witham now. It is not the place that it was when I first knew it in the late 40s!
It isn't, even in US terms Cambridge is a medium sized city.
US exit polls for example say big cities have a population over 100,000, medium sized cities a population from 50,000 to 100,000 and small towns a population from 10,000 to 50,000.
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
I'd have to put Dubrovnik in the top ten.
The foreign city I most enjoy is Naples.
I would put both Grenada in Spain and Urbino in Italy in my top ten. Both cities where you could almost imagine you are back in medieval times
I certainly wouldn't call either Cambridge or NYC beautiful. Fascinating perhaps but not beautiful.
Cambridge is quite beautiful, from certain angles. But it's still not a city, no matter what @ydoethur or the British government claims.
NYC is impressive, but not beautiful.
I'm intrigued. What's your definition of a city?
I have several requirements, which include (but are not limited to):
* Own airport with regular scheduled services * At least two parliamentary constituencies
So basically - there are hardly any cities in England? Because by your logic, Worcester, Hereford, Exeter, Lichfield, Canterbury, Carlisle, Gloucester, Stoke, Derby, Truro, Chester, Lancaster, Chichester, Salisbury, Bath, Wells, are not cities - and that's without even going into detail.
And I think outside England only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Belfast would qualify.
I think you've proved my point.
Can you imagine a sentence starting "Beijing, in common with other great cities like Lichfield"?
No. Me neither.
Yes, but there's a qualifying word 'great' (meaning large) in there.
In the UK its a city if the queen says it is.
If we're comparing places in different countries, we need to have common standards. And, frankly, the Queen declaring something doesn't cut it.
So, I'm going with:
- own airport with regularly scheduled services - transit system with more than just buses - at least 4x the population of Bedford
If you don't like my conditions, then tough. They are reasonable and well reasoned.
Aren't you confusing the different concepts of 'metropolis' and 'city'?
What you've described is a large urban area. What we're talking about is a 'city,' which is a particular appellation applied to certain urban areas, of varying size.
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
I'd have to put Dubrovnik in the top ten.
The foreign city I most enjoy is Naples.
I would put both Grenada in Spain and Urbino in Italy in my top ten. Both cities where you could almost imagine you are back in medieval times
I certainly wouldn't call either Cambridge or NYC beautiful. Fascinating perhaps but not beautiful.
Cambridge is quite beautiful, from certain angles. But it's still not a city, no matter what @ydoethur or the British government claims.
NYC is impressive, but not beautiful.
I'm intrigued. What's your definition of a city?
I have several requirements, which include (but are not limited to):
* Own airport with regular scheduled services * At least two parliamentary constituencies
So basically - there are hardly any cities in England? Because by your logic, Worcester, Hereford, Exeter, Lichfield, Canterbury, Carlisle, Gloucester, Stoke, Derby, Truro, Chester, Lancaster, Chichester, Salisbury, Bath, Wells, are not cities - and that's without even going into detail.
And I think outside England only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Belfast would qualify.
I think you've proved my point.
Can you imagine a sentence starting "Beijing, in common with other great cities like Lichfield"?
No. Me neither.
As opposed to the many cities in the US, with populations of a handful of thousand?
Exactly.
Hence my completely objective three criteria that I've listed.
It isn't, even in US terms Cambridge is a medium sized city.
US exit polls for example say big cities have a population over 100,000, medium sized cities a population from 50,000 to 100,000 and small towns a population from 10,000 to 50,000.
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Not sure that the grassy, rolling sea of the Sussex Downs should come below Norfolk and Suffolk, which are mind-numbingly boring and flat.
What about the most soul-destroying road in the UK. I will make a strong case for the A47.
A47 goes through Rutland, one of the nicest parts of the country.
I’ll go with the M5 viaduct into Birmingham, or maybe the M6 viaduct into Birmingham.
M4 west, junctions 16 (Swindon) to 18 (Bath) is unremittingly dull.
The A47 is an incredibly dull road, especially either side of Kings Lynn, it used to have a fantastic greasy spoon cafe at Necton, now gone. However the A17 beats it for sheer depression. When i used to be allowed to drive by the health nazis and holidayed in Scotland there was simply nothing worse than homeward bound driving all day to reach Newark and having 2 hours of A17, A47 to go.........
The A130 is also a pointless shit of a road that serves only to take you from Chelmsford where you don't want to be to Rayleigh, Wickford or sodding Benfleet where nobody except Mark Francois wants to be
Oi! I was brought up in Benfleet. Mark François has nothing to do with Benfleet he's MP for Rayleigh.
And the Benfleet Downs and the Hadleigh Country Park were my playground as a youth!
To be fair though, Castle Point, which is now the District Council, has one of the lowest percentages of graduates as residents in the country. And I left, as did my graduate children and grandchildren!
My apologies! To be fair my scorn and despair is from a very unhappy time i lived in the area (Witham) in the early millenium. Essex and me, we were not a team.
I live not far from Witham now. It is not the place that it was when I first knew it in the late 40s!
I have a wry smile as the train goes past the station between Norwich and London. I once managed to fail to stay awake between Hatfield Peverel and Witham on the last train of the night and had to cab it from Colchester. That, i think, is a metaphor for every moment of my life in Essex
Loathe as I am to bring us back to the topic, it's just occurred to me that the Vardys may well be having their legal fees bankrolled by The Sun/Rupert Murdoch, as it seems it was a Sun reporter that was highly instrumental in creating the situation which provided the tabloids with so much copy.
Anybody else had the same thought? It would certainly help explain why the couple pursued such a hopeless case to such lengths.
If Murdoch is bankrolling Vardy, that would prove Mrs Rooney’s original claim beyond a shadow of a doubt, and the newspaper revealing it’s sources. I reckon Jamie Vardy gets the bill.
It isn't, even in US terms Cambridge is a medium sized city.
US exit polls for example say big cities have a population over 100,000, medium sized cities a population from 50,000 to 100,000 and small towns a population from 10,000 to 50,000.
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
I'd have to put Dubrovnik in the top ten.
The foreign city I most enjoy is Naples.
I would put both Grenada in Spain and Urbino in Italy in my top ten. Both cities where you could almost imagine you are back in medieval times
I certainly wouldn't call either Cambridge or NYC beautiful. Fascinating perhaps but not beautiful.
Cambridge is quite beautiful, from certain angles. But it's still not a city, no matter what @ydoethur or the British government claims.
NYC is impressive, but not beautiful.
I'm intrigued. What's your definition of a city?
I have several requirements, which include (but are not limited to):
* Own airport with regular scheduled services * At least two parliamentary constituencies
So basically - there are hardly any cities in England? Because by your logic, Worcester, Hereford, Exeter, Lichfield, Canterbury, Carlisle, Gloucester, Stoke, Derby, Truro, Chester, Lancaster, Chichester, Salisbury, Bath, Wells, are not cities - and that's without even going into detail.
And I think outside England only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Belfast would qualify.
I think you've proved my point.
Can you imagine a sentence starting "Beijing, in common with other great cities like Lichfield"?
No. Me neither.
Yes, but there's a qualifying word 'great' (meaning large) in there.
In the UK its a city if the queen says it is.
If we're comparing places in different countries, we need to have common standards. And, frankly, the Queen declaring something doesn't cut it.
So, I'm going with:
- own airport with regularly scheduled services - transit system with more than just buses - at least 4x the population of Bedford
If you don't like my conditions, then tough. They are reasonable and well reasoned.
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
I'd have to put Dubrovnik in the top ten.
The foreign city I most enjoy is Naples.
I would put both Grenada in Spain and Urbino in Italy in my top ten. Both cities where you could almost imagine you are back in medieval times
I certainly wouldn't call either Cambridge or NYC beautiful. Fascinating perhaps but not beautiful.
Cambridge is quite beautiful, from certain angles. But it's still not a city, no matter what @ydoethur or the British government claims.
NYC is impressive, but not beautiful.
I'm intrigued. What's your definition of a city?
I have several requirements, which include (but are not limited to):
* Own airport with regular scheduled services * At least two parliamentary constituencies
So basically - there are hardly any cities in England? Because by your logic, Worcester, Hereford, Exeter, Lichfield, Canterbury, Carlisle, Gloucester, Stoke, Derby, Truro, Chester, Lancaster, Chichester, Salisbury, Bath, Wells, are not cities - and that's without even going into detail.
And I think outside England only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Belfast would qualify.
Cardiff is only hanging on to its airport due to Welsh government largesse. Does a vanity airport count?
Most of them are. After all, if we don't include vanity airports that's Newcastle upon Tyne, Nottingham and Sheffield out as well.
I wonder if I am alone on pb.com in having flown from all three of those airports?
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
You could argue that in a list like this there ought to be two Essex's North and South. North Essex, away from the coast in the Tendring area, has some extremely attractive villages and well preserved, historic small towns. Poor South Essex has been attacked by overspill and small-scale industrialisation.
Maldon has grown on me over the years. Family live there so I visit quite often.
Some nice pubs and a very nice walk along the river to the statue of Earl Britnoth. Who was an adviser to King Ethelred the Badly Advised (aka Unready) and one can see how he got the job!
He'd be astounded and delighted if he were to be told that the lay about his bravery against the Northmen is still being sung today, albeit in academia (and just possibly one or two film or TV series, I suspect).
Loathe as I am to bring us back to the topic, it's just occurred to me that the Vardys may well be having their legal fees bankrolled by The Sun/Rupert Murdoch, as it seems it was a Sun reporter that was highly instrumental in creating the situation which provided the tabloids with so much copy.
Anybody else had the same thought? It would certainly help explain why the couple pursued such a hopeless case to such lengths.
I've heard of lawyers offering no win, no fee without the client understanding they can still get wiped out by the other side's costs.
Lots of labour MPs joining pickets tomorrow apparently. Lets see how Strongman Starmer asserts his authority over them. Im predicting he will do nothing and hope it all goes away
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
I'd have to put Dubrovnik in the top ten.
The foreign city I most enjoy is Naples.
I would put both Grenada in Spain and Urbino in Italy in my top ten. Both cities where you could almost imagine you are back in medieval times
I certainly wouldn't call either Cambridge or NYC beautiful. Fascinating perhaps but not beautiful.
Cambridge is quite beautiful, from certain angles. But it's still not a city, no matter what @ydoethur or the British government claims.
NYC is impressive, but not beautiful.
I'm intrigued. What's your definition of a city?
I have several requirements, which include (but are not limited to):
* Own airport with regular scheduled services * At least two parliamentary constituencies
So basically - there are hardly any cities in England? Because by your logic, Worcester, Hereford, Exeter, Lichfield, Canterbury, Carlisle, Gloucester, Stoke, Derby, Truro, Chester, Lancaster, Chichester, Salisbury, Bath, Wells, are not cities - and that's without even going into detail.
And I think outside England only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Belfast would qualify.
Cardiff is only hanging on to its airport due to Welsh government largesse. Does a vanity airport count?
Most of them are. After all, if we don't include vanity airports that's Newcastle upon Tyne, Nottingham and Sheffield out as well.
I wonder if I am alone on pb.com in having flown from all three of those airports?
With that adjustment, I'm confident in answering 'yes.'
"UK undoubtedly has some beautiful parts but mainly in protected National Park areas. Whereas France is 75% beautiful and 25% rough/nondescript the UK (is probably 25% beautiful and 75% rough/nondescript. As we are so overcrowded the beautiful areas tend to be overrun with people whereas in France you can drive for miles in glorious unspoilt countryside."
++++
I wouldn't demur with any of that. This is why I put France at #1 and the UK at #9. Plus the French climate is superior (for now) and their urbanism less spoiled
But the UK is still beautiful in parts, and splendidly varied, with an often-glorious coastline and some divine cityscapes - Cambridge! - and on a world ranking is right up there. It's just not as impressive as France, but France is number 1
Which brings us to the bigger point. European countries crowd the top spots of "Most Beautiful Countries", which is why Europe, as a whole, gets more tourists than anywhere on earth. The tourists aren't dumb
There are some natural landscapes that, individually, are more breath-taking than anywhere in Europe - the Antarctic Peninsula for sure, perhaps the wilds of the American West, Greenland, Ethiopia, bits of Oz, central Asia, NZ (apparently, haven't been), and so on, but for overall beauty, Europe sweeps the prizes
The Telegraph list is bonkers, and is merely designed to stir up arguments. Which it has done. So well done that editor
I am consistently surprised by this attitude on PB. Most of France that I've been to has not struck me as particularly attractive. I lived in Nice for 3 months, travelled a bit in the South, and the North, been to Paris, the French Alps. There's a lot of it I haven't seen, but my abiding impression is of villages with ugly billboards shittily stuck everywhere, severely over-pollarded trees, genteel suburban decay, and dodging dogshit in the city centres. I am sure the countryside is pleasant in the places I haven't been to. For comparison, I grew up in West Sussex near the Surrey border, which is nice but not spectacular. I now live in Scotland, which is stunningly beautiful, so perhaps I've been spoiled. I think some PBers, even the professed patriots, think there's something more glamorous about French squallor than British squallor.
Con GAIN Rosie once Liz is crowned. Shes gagging for the blue life
Don't think so somehow; standing for re-selection isn't really a sign of a switcher. More interestingly, Rosie Duffield has been selected despite (or because of?) her views on trans issues, that don't please some. Perhaps Labour isn't quite as daft on these issues as some on here would like to believe?
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
Beautiful is in the eye, etc, and beauty close up or beauty viewed from a distance?
But if you mean their overall visual impression I wouldn’t put Paris at number two, noting that London doesn’t make the list at all. Prague ought to qualify, as, IMHO, should Bergamo. You could make a case for Naples, given its setting. Edinburgh has its dramatic castle, yes, but the rest of it? Top ten in the world, I don’t think so. New York deserves lots of superlatives, but I wouldn’t put beauty among them.
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
I'd have to put Dubrovnik in the top ten.
The foreign city I most enjoy is Naples.
I would put both Grenada in Spain and Urbino in Italy in my top ten. Both cities where you could almost imagine you are back in medieval times
I certainly wouldn't call either Cambridge or NYC beautiful. Fascinating perhaps but not beautiful.
Cambridge is quite beautiful, from certain angles. But it's still not a city, no matter what @ydoethur or the British government claims.
NYC is impressive, but not beautiful.
I'm intrigued. What's your definition of a city?
I have several requirements, which include (but are not limited to):
* Own airport with regular scheduled services * At least two parliamentary constituencies
So basically - there are hardly any cities in England? Because by your logic, Worcester, Hereford, Exeter, Lichfield, Canterbury, Carlisle, Gloucester, Stoke, Derby, Truro, Chester, Lancaster, Chichester, Salisbury, Bath, Wells, are not cities - and that's without even going into detail.
And I think outside England only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Belfast would qualify.
I think you've proved my point.
Can you imagine a sentence starting "Beijing, in common with other great cities like Lichfield"?
No. Me neither.
As opposed to the many cities in the US, with populations of a handful of thousand?
Exactly.
Hence my completely objective three criteria that I've listed.
My definition of a city is somewhere large enough that the public transport system is so good there's no point in having a car.
Towns are places that should be big enough to support a decent public transport system, but they don't due to a lack of investment.
Rural areas are those where a decent public transport system is an impossible fantasy.
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
I'd have to put Dubrovnik in the top ten.
The foreign city I most enjoy is Naples.
I would put both Grenada in Spain and Urbino in Italy in my top ten. Both cities where you could almost imagine you are back in medieval times
I certainly wouldn't call either Cambridge or NYC beautiful. Fascinating perhaps but not beautiful.
Cambridge is quite beautiful, from certain angles. But it's still not a city, no matter what @ydoethur or the British government claims.
NYC is impressive, but not beautiful.
I'm intrigued. What's your definition of a city?
I have several requirements, which include (but are not limited to):
* Own airport with regular scheduled services * At least two parliamentary constituencies
So basically - there are hardly any cities in England? Because by your logic, Worcester, Hereford, Exeter, Lichfield, Canterbury, Carlisle, Gloucester, Stoke, Derby, Truro, Chester, Lancaster, Chichester, Salisbury, Bath, Wells, are not cities - and that's without even going into detail.
And I think outside England only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Belfast would qualify.
Cardiff is only hanging on to its airport due to Welsh government largesse. Does a vanity airport count?
Most of them are. After all, if we don't include vanity airports that's Newcastle upon Tyne, Nottingham and Sheffield out as well.
I wonder if I am alone on pb.com in having flown from all three of those airports?
With that adjustment, I'm confident in answering 'yes.'
I will even add that I am one of the rare air travellers who likes to arrive at an airport by public transport, and so have arrived at Nottingham and Sheffield (more correctly, I think these days, Robin Hood Airport Doncaster Sheffield, or RHADS) by bus. They look at you in blank astonishment if you emerge from Nottingham airport and ask where the bus stops are.
Devil's Den by Clatford between Marlborough and Lockeridge
Maybe there were stones like this joining Avebury and Amesbury?
Pretty ugly compared to the Scotland region
Don't know. I was just thinking about the view over the Vale of Pewsey from Knap Hill above Alton Priors (where I suspect there was a pub in the CAMRA guide c. 1980, as well).
Seriously mate, we need to mix up our salutations a bit.
Alarmingly buster, this is not a matter for joking.
Earnestly my friend, I agree.
See here chum, I think we should just let CHB have his oats for now, until he rediscovers the joy of being sober. Because I don't think remonstrating is working. He'll be fine.
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
I'd have to put Dubrovnik in the top ten.
The foreign city I most enjoy is Naples.
I would put both Grenada in Spain and Urbino in Italy in my top ten. Both cities where you could almost imagine you are back in medieval times
I certainly wouldn't call either Cambridge or NYC beautiful. Fascinating perhaps but not beautiful.
Cambridge is quite beautiful, from certain angles. But it's still not a city, no matter what @ydoethur or the British government claims.
NYC is impressive, but not beautiful.
I'm intrigued. What's your definition of a city?
I have several requirements, which include (but are not limited to):
* Own airport with regular scheduled services * At least two parliamentary constituencies
So basically - there are hardly any cities in England? Because by your logic, Worcester, Hereford, Exeter, Lichfield, Canterbury, Carlisle, Gloucester, Stoke, Derby, Truro, Chester, Lancaster, Chichester, Salisbury, Bath, Wells, are not cities - and that's without even going into detail.
And I think outside England only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Belfast would qualify.
I think you've proved my point.
Can you imagine a sentence starting "Beijing, in common with other great cities like Lichfield"?
No. Me neither.
As opposed to the many cities in the US, with populations of a handful of thousand?
Exactly.
Hence my completely objective three criteria that I've listed.
My definition of a city is somewhere large enough that the public transport system is so good there's no point in having a car.
Towns are places that should be big enough to support a decent public transport system, but they don't due to a lack of investment.
Rural areas are those where a decent public transport system is an impossible fantasy.
My definition of a city is somewhere with an ancient cathedral.
Because this is the sort of thing I cannot help doing, I have ranked all 39 historical English counties for loveliness. Necessarily highly subjective and almost solely an aesthetic thing - it doesn't take into account how much fun you can have there. Middlesex comes bottom only because being entirely urban it is sui generis - of course lots about London is lovely.
The general pattern is the west and north are lovelier. To me, anyway. I can well appreciate that to some the ideal will be the big open skies of Norfolk or the soft rolling hills of Oxfordshire.
Seriously pal (just to be different…) avoid the shots/spirits. Not only do they mess you up medically more than beer and wine you will just get into the immense high/immense low the next morning cycle that you will only cope with by starting the high again with the booze or find yourself trying to cope with the worst booze blues and alconoia the next day and end up in a v bad place.
Canterbury is likely to swing further to Labour I'd have thought.
Indeed, it’s an island of educated common sense amid the ocean of rural Kentish seats that voted Brexit and now find their roads chock-full of lorries and frustrated tourists trying to leave the country, with police checkpoints on every major road junction.
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
I'd have to put Dubrovnik in the top ten.
The foreign city I most enjoy is Naples.
I would put both Grenada in Spain and Urbino in Italy in my top ten. Both cities where you could almost imagine you are back in medieval times
I certainly wouldn't call either Cambridge or NYC beautiful. Fascinating perhaps but not beautiful.
Cambridge is quite beautiful, from certain angles. But it's still not a city, no matter what @ydoethur or the British government claims.
NYC is impressive, but not beautiful.
I'm intrigued. What's your definition of a city?
I have several requirements, which include (but are not limited to):
* Own airport with regular scheduled services * At least two parliamentary constituencies
So basically - there are hardly any cities in England? Because by your logic, Worcester, Hereford, Exeter, Lichfield, Canterbury, Carlisle, Gloucester, Stoke, Derby, Truro, Chester, Lancaster, Chichester, Salisbury, Bath, Wells, are not cities - and that's without even going into detail.
And I think outside England only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Belfast would qualify.
Cardiff is only hanging on to its airport due to Welsh government largesse. Does a vanity airport count?
Most of them are. After all, if we don't include vanity airports that's Newcastle upon Tyne, Nottingham and Sheffield out as well.
I wonder if I am alone on pb.com in having flown from all three of those airports?
With that adjustment, I'm confident in answering 'yes.'
I will even add that I am one of the rare air travellers who likes to arrive at an airport by public transport, and so have arrived at Nottingham and Sheffield (more correctly, I think these days, Robin Hood Airport Doncaster Sheffield, or RHADS) by bus. They look at you in blank astonishment if you emerge from Nottingham airport and ask where the bus stops are.
Right then. As I’m on a boringly air conditioned train to Richmond, my top ten beautiful cities
1. Venice 2. Paris 3. St Petersburg 4. Florence 5. New Orleans 6. Cambridge 7. Hong Kong 8. New York City 9. Edinburgh 10. Newent 11. Bordeaux
Beautiful is in the eye, etc, and beauty close up or beauty viewed from a distance?
But if you mean their overall visual impression I wouldn’t put Paris at number two, noting that London doesn’t make the list at all. Prague ought to qualify, as, IMHO, should Bergamo. You could make a case for Naples, given its setting. Edinburgh has its dramatic castle, yes, but the rest of it? Top ten in the world, I don’t think so. New York deserves lots of superlatives, but I wouldn’t put beauty among them.
In defence of Edinburgh, it has the New Town, as well as the Old. It has the hills, not just the central hills of the Castle, Calton and Arthur's Seat, but other hills around the city from which it can be best viewed, such as Blackford Hill. It has the Water of Leith and Dean Village. It's a lot more than just the castle.
Loathe as I am to bring us back to the topic, it's just occurred to me that the Vardys may well be having their legal fees bankrolled by The Sun/Rupert Murdoch, as it seems it was a Sun reporter that was highly instrumental in creating the situation which provided the tabloids with so much copy.
Anybody else had the same thought? It would certainly help explain why the couple pursued such a hopeless case to such lengths.
I've heard of lawyers offering no win, no fee without the client understanding they can still get wiped out by the other side's costs.
Mebbe, but since it was blindingly obvious Vardy would lose I cannot imagine such an arrangement would have been offered.
Comments
beautiful and significant place in the worlda small town 9 miles northwest of Gloucester.Leon. @Mexicanpete and I troll each other over it on a regular basis and I suspect this is another such.
* Own airport with regular scheduled services
* At least two parliamentary constituencies
And the Benfleet Downs and the Hadleigh Country Park were my playground as a youth!
To be fair though, Castle Point, which is now the District Council, has one of the lowest percentages of graduates as residents in the country. And I left, as did my graduate children and grandchildren!
I once did some analysis of economic justifications for toll roads. If you use value of time measures, it's very difficult to set a toll low enough so that people are motivated to use it by the time saving but high enough so you can afford to build the road. You have to justify it on the qualitative experience "you won't save that much time, but pay us this sum and you'll find the next 20 minutes much more pleasant than you otherwise might".
I find it hard to believe that Russia would turn to nuclear weapons to defend its occupation of Melitopol. It's absurd. The amount of evil we're allowing to happen by being intimidated by the Russians is sickening.
But its a road from Hell to other Hell through Wide Boy and Pie Hell
And I think outside England only Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Cardiff and Belfast would qualify.
Cambridge is a nearby relative giant
Can you imagine a sentence starting "Beijing, in common with other great cities like Lichfield"?
No. Me neither.
I'm not saying that local government has to equate to the counties which have been around since Norman times. (Though there are some arguments for that.) I just want an immutable set of subdivisions to use. And somewhere to identify with - I'm not going to start changing what my home county is every time there's a local government reorganisation.
Lots of places which don't have county councils still have other institutions which cover the territory of the historical county (more or less). The Cheshire RFU. The Chester Diocesan Guild of Change Ringers. And so on. Hell, Middlesex even has a rather famous cricket club associated with it.
What person would be so utterly lost in taste as to compare Lichfield to a shitheap like Beijing?
Edit - and of course, by your criteria, Beijing isn't a city anyway, as it has no parliamentary constituencies...
In the UK its a city if the queen says it is.
Anybody else had the same thought? It would certainly help explain why the couple pursued such a hopeless case to such lengths.
Which would be absurd.
Norwich
Everywhere else is not.
"Medicating Complexity
That antidepressants may have little or no effectiveness should not surprise us.
Theodore Dalrymple"
https://www.city-journal.org/the-complexities-of-depression
It was one week before I retired!
See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historic_counties_of_England
No less valid than ceremonial counties, and more widely understood. We all here know what we're talking about with the historic counties. Who here is 100% sure what the ceremonial counties are?
...
Those ticking the hills on this list, for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_counties_of_England_and_Wales_in_1964_by_highest_point
are rather more common than those ticking the hills on this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ceremonial_counties_of_England_by_highest_point
The Echo is ecstatic.
So, I'm going with:
- own airport with regularly scheduled services
- transit system with more than just buses
- at least 4x the population of Bedford
If you don't like my conditions, then tough. They are reasonable and well reasoned.
US exit polls for example say big cities have a population over 500,000, medium sized cities a population from
50,000 to 500,000 and towns a population from 10,000 to 50,000.
Everything else is rural or suburbia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_United_States_presidential_election
Later. My evening meal is ready so goodbye folks!
And how big is a small city?
What you've described is a large urban area. What we're talking about is a 'city,' which is a particular appellation applied to certain urban areas, of varying size.
Hence my completely objective three criteria that I've listed.
I once managed to fail to stay awake between Hatfield Peverel and Witham on the last train of the night and had to cab it from Colchester. That, i think, is a metaphor for every moment of my life in Essex
St David’s 1,600
(Some posters would of course find the task easier than others.)
Im predicting he will do nothing and hope it all goes away
More interestingly, Rosie Duffield has been selected despite (or because of?) her views on trans issues, that don't please some.
Perhaps Labour isn't quite as daft on these issues as some on here would like to believe?
But if you mean their overall visual impression I wouldn’t put Paris at number two, noting that London doesn’t make the list at all. Prague ought to qualify, as, IMHO, should Bergamo. You could make a case for Naples, given its setting. Edinburgh has its dramatic castle, yes, but the rest of it? Top ten in the world, I don’t think so. New York deserves lots of superlatives, but I wouldn’t put beauty among them.
Maybe there were stones like this joining Avebury and Amesbury?
Pretty ugly compared to the Scotland region
Towns are places that should be big enough to support a decent public transport system, but they don't due to a lack of investment.
Rural areas are those where a decent public transport system is an impossible fantasy.
I will even add that I am one of the rare air travellers who likes to arrive at an airport by public transport, and so have arrived at Nottingham and Sheffield (more correctly, I think these days, Robin Hood Airport Doncaster Sheffield, or RHADS) by bus.
They look at you in blank astonishment if you emerge from Nottingham airport and ask where the bus stops are.
This is your third night in a row iirc?
Shots and parental life don't really go that well together, so I'm rather boring now.