A vision of Britain from 1801 to now.
Including maps, statistical trends and historical descriptions.
A system limited to statistics and maps would be rather boring. While we lack the capacity to write our own more broadly based description of each place and its history, we have included over 96,000 descriptions of places written in the late 19th century. These come from four separate publications:
All major settlements have two entries in our system, a short one from Bartholomew plus a longer one from the Imperial Gazetteer, Groome or Lewis, depending on the part of the British Isles. We try to include the entry with the most appropriate length on our "place" pages.
These gazetteers include entries for the towns and villages on which the districts and parishes in our Administrative Gazetteer were based, so we have tried to make the relevant text accessible from our place home pages. However, they also contain many entries for mountains and rivers, stately homes and ruins, and so on. These are only accessible by directly searching the descriptive gazetteers via one of our expert search options. From there, you can narrow your search by specifying a nation or county, and also by the kind of entry. You can also search the full text of the gazetteers for a particular place-name, or other word.