Shire county
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A shire county or non-metropolitan county in England, is a county level entity which is not a metropolitan county. The names of most, but not all, shire counties end in the suffix "-shire"; for example, Kent is a shire county. The counties typically have populations of 300,000 to 1.4 million.
The term is sometimes used in a restricted sense to refer only to the administrative counties that have a two-tier structure, of a county council and district councils. It therefore excludes the various unitary districts, including Herefordshire and Rutland. The Isle of Wight is a non-metropolitan county, but is also a unitary area, as its district councils have been abolished.
The term "shire county" is actually a tautology, the word county coming from French and shire from Saxon.
There are 35 counties with multiple districts:
Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, Derbyshire, Devon, Dorset, County Durham, East Sussex, Essex, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, North Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Shropshire, Somerset, Staffordshire, Suffolk, Surrey, Warwickshire, West Sussex, Wiltshire, Worcestershire
Of these, all apart from Berkshire have county councils. Sometimes 'shire county' is used to exclude Berkshire, because it has no county council (its districts are Unitary authorities but have no county status).
Formally, most unitary authorities in England are also non-metropolitan counties.
The term 'non-metropolitan county' is also sometimes used to refer to the eight Welsh counties created by the Local Government Act 1972. Although the Act does not use the term specifically when referring to Wales, neither does it in general parts of the act distinguish between the Welsh entities and the English non-metropolitan counties, referring to both as non-metropolitan counties. The Local Government (Wales) Act 1994 amends the Local Government Act 1972 such that the new Welsh principal areas which have the status of counties are not implied to be non-metropolitan counties.
| Lists of English counties | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All counties; | By area | By population | By population density | By highest point | |
| Ceremonial counties; | By area | By population | By population density | ||
| Non-metropolitan counties; | By area | By population | By population density | ||
| Current structure of subnational entities in England (2006) | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Region level: | Region | Region | Region | Region | |
| County level: | Metropolitan county | Shire county | Unitary authority | Greater London | |
| District level: | Metropolitan district | Shire district | n/a | London borough | |
| Parish level: | (Civil parish) | (Civil parish) | (Civil parish) | n/a | |
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