On 14/09/2015 00:41, Tom Hughes wrote:
On 14/09/15 00:16, Lester Caine wrote:
The OSM wiki defines 'hamlet' as less than 100-200 people, but village
supposedly starts at 1000 up to 10000 with the proviso that it depends
on the country. Ideally the two would perhaps meet :) We are perhaps
looking at a population of around 8000 for a town designation in the UK,
but anything down to 100 is still classified as a village by the ONS.
What are actually missing from the OSN data are ANY hamlets despite
their claiming to include them.
Please don't try and draw bright lines based on population, and
certainly don't try and mass edit things based on that. It's much more
subjective than that.
Nobody would ever have described the place where I grew up as anything
other than a town, but we always used to reckon on a population of
around 3000 people (wikipedia says 5627 as of the 2011 census) and
certainly 8000 sounds very high to me.
Historically, the distinction between a hamlet, a village and a town was
based on ecclesiastical parishes. A village was a populated area
comprising a parish of its own, with one parish church. A town was a
contiguous populated area comprising multiple ecclesiastical parishes,
while a hamlet was a populated area too small to have its own parish
(and thus being contained within another one, either a village parish or
an outlying area of a town parish).
This official distinction has been lost over the years with multiple
phases of local government reorganisation, but it still provides a good
rule of thumb.
In England and Wales, a civil parish council can choose to style itself
a town council if it wishes. The majority of those which have done so
are those which, prior to the Local Government Act 1972, would have been
a Municipal Borough (eg, Evesham or Lewes) and which meet the historical
definition of a town, but by no means all of them fall into this category.
What that means is that population alone is a no more than a rough guide
to the likely status of a town or village, at least in England and
Wales. There's a significant overlap between the largest villages and
the smallest towns.
Mark
--
http://www.markgoodge.com
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