England is divided by a number of different regional schemes for various purposes. Since the creation of the
Government Office Regions in 1994 and their adoption for statistical purposes in 1999, some historical regional schemes have become obsolete. However, many alternative regional designations also exist and continue to be widely used.
Alternative
Cultural
Informal and overlapping regional designations are often used to describe areas of England. They include:
Midlands, often considered interchangeable with Mercia
Mercia, often considered interchangeable with the Midlands
Northumbria, associated mainly with the Viking age rump kingdom of
Northumbria (the counties of Durham and Northumberland), however can be considered interchangeable with Northern England
Counties
Historic counties and the Yorkshire
Ridings are no longer used, in full, as units for administrative or ceremonial purposes. These have continued to be recognised in sport and used by organisations as regional units.
Britain in Bloom divides England into 12 regions. Mixture of government regions with some altered names. It also includes
Cumbria, Thames-and-Chilterns (
Berkshire,
Buckinghamshire and
Oxfordshire) and part of south east and south west as South-and-South-West.
National Trust
The
National Trust has 10 regional offices in England. These are
Devon and
Cornwall – part of the official South West region
The present government office regions closely resemble Civil Defence Regions. During the latter part of the Cold War, the United Kingdom was divided into 11 such regions, most of which were divided themselves into sub-regions. The regions were numbered as shown in the list, numbers for sub-regions were of the form 11.
The regions were based on pre-
Second World War regions, but were substantially altered in the 1970s, with the merger of South East and Southern regions, and alterations in the north. They were again altered in 1984, to merge the English regions 1 and 2 to become a single North East region, and Scotland's two southern regions (East and West Zones) becoming a single South Zone.[6]
1980s
From the mid-1980s, the eight English Civil Defence Regions were as follows (using 1974/1975 boundaries):
The
Redcliffe-Maud Report produced by the
Royal Commission on local government reform in 1969 recommended the creation of eight provinces. In approximate terms, these were to be:
^Henry Cromwell was nominally under the
Lord Deputy of Ireland, Charles Fleetwood, but Fleetwood's departure for England in September 1655 left him for all practical purposes the ruler of Ireland