Another Piece Of Bloggage By Gary
Self professed "geek with a life", geo-blogger, geo-talker and geo-tweeter, Gary works in London and Berlin as Director of the Places Registry for Nokia; he's a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and sits on the W3C POI Working Group and the UK Location User Group. A contributor to the Mapstraction mapping API, Gary speaks and presents at a wide range of conferences and events including Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, Geo-Loco, Social-Loco, GeoMob, the BCS GeoSpatial SG and LocBiz. Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, Gary blogs at www.vicchi.org and tweets as @vicchi.
Mail | Web | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Google+ | More Posts (271)Other bloggage that may or may not be geo-related to this one:
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- iPass Connect on the Mac; great service, appallingly designed app
I find myself travelling a lot for work these days and that means a roaming service for wifi hotspots and hotel internet connections really makes life simpler. I could maintain...
- Remapping The World By Population Size
From the department of cartographical curiosities comes this wonder; a map of the world but with the countries changed so that their population size corresponds to the size of each...
- Your Place Is Not My Place; The Perils of Disambiguation
We take the art of geographic lookup for granted these days; type a place name into a form on a web site or feed it into a web service API...
- Roughly Halfway Between England And France
As a race and as a society we just love our boundaries and our borders; go here, don’t go here, this is yours, this is ours. We put up border...
This doesn’t answer the important question. When England plays Scotland at rugby, who gets which national anthem and why ?
Very cool! There’s a slightly more different diagram on Wikipedia, which my blog covered back in 2006; one of the things missing from the above is that England and Wales share a legal system, and so are not separate entities in a very strong sense; there *is* the Welsh Assembly which has no equivalent in England, but it cannot pass Wales-only laws.
See the discussion on http://www.crypticide.com/dropsafe/article/1696 ; doesn’t cover the BOT though.
Oh, and see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Isles_%28terminology%29 which has been updated since the cited discussion, obviously…
It’s incredible how complex it is. My favourite aspect is that England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are “Countries” in the country of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Good times.
One minor error with your diagram is that Northern Ireland is not part of the Republic of Ireland – you should have a separate circle within the Ireland circle for the RoI that does not encompass Northern Ireland.
Of course the term ‘British Isles’ is as insulting to Irish people as would be the term ‘French Isles’ to encompass Great Britain, and the Channel Islands to the British.
See also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Isles
Useful narrative. There’s a bit more detail at the web archive’s copy of the old Number 10 website, which also outlines devolution and informal uses of the term Britain.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080209003312/http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page823.asp
“the sovereign state of the Republic of Ireland or Eire.”
Ooh, controversial.
I take it you haven’t seen the interminable “what is the name of the state which occupies the bits that aren’t Northern Ireland?” dispute on Wikipedia?
The trouble is that England doesn’t have a National Anthem (although “Land of Hope and Glory” would be a suggestion) – “God Save the Queen” is actually the Commonwealth Anthem and therefore equally applicable to the England, Scotland, and Wales teams (although the Welsh do have their own anthem).
Confused? You should be!
Wales is not a country; it is a principality. Not to be picky or anything.
@Glen: Caveat: No flame war intended here. There is a historical Principality of Wales (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Wales) but to quote that article “The term principality is sometimes used in a modern sense to denote all of Wales, but this has no constitutional basis”. So from an administrative point of view Wales is a country so viewing it as a principality formally is incorrect but view it as one informally, colloquially and historically is correct.
I live in Wales and can confirm that it is indeed a country.
A very worthy and interesting topic, Gary.
I can only comment confidently on two aspects;
(a) ‘The British Isles’ as an archaic term and (b) George Best.
(a); the British Isles ceased to be so after Ireland’s Independence in 1922.
http://www.irelandinformationguide.com/British_Isles
Geographically however, it was still referred to as that for many decades afterwards. Because it was ‘handy’ to do so. Physically, like Iberia, scientists would refer to the two islands as one. But it did piss off Irish Nationalists. And was/is very politically incorrect [before that term became a cliche].
The Ordnance Survey Ireland do not recognise The British Isles in it’s mapping, nor does the National Geographic Association;
http://irishnationalcaucus.blogspot.com/2008/01/british-isles-references-leave-irish.html
Nowadays, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland are geographically known as “The Island of Ireland” with the two administrations referred to and accepted politically and colloquially as North and South. Devolved power from Westminister has sanctioned this. This is only in the last decade though.
Hence the Island of Ireland is a geographically recognised entitity and not part of the British Isles that includes England, Scotland, Wales, Jersey etc. but it contains the sovereignty of the six Northern counties which are part of the United Kingdom.
I had my first geography lesson in Britain, my last in Ireland – so I know what’s what.
So the Venn Diagram [blue] should be Great Britain and Ireland.
(b) George Best; I cannot understand how a womanising short-serving alcoholic footballer got so much cred / adoration / and an airport named after him!?!
Note also that in some parts of ‘The Continent’ (now that’s another discussion) they refer to us as ‘The Island’, though I wouldn’t even attempt to define what the extent of that description.
You talk about England, Scotland and Wales being parts of the island of Great Britain. But each of those countries also includes offshore islands (admittedly, some are not very offshore), such as the Isle of Wight, the Scilly Isles, Lundy, Anglesey, the Hebrides, etc. So, your excellent diagram is rather incomplete.
@graybo: All of what you say is indeed true, however to be fair the diagram doesn’t attempt to be totally geographically inclusive, it attempts to help answer the question of the relationships between the different geographical entities which make up this region.
Yes, the isles of Wight, Lundy, Anglesey and so on are not shown but then again, no one’s ever asked me “what country is the Isle of Wight part of?” but lots of people have asked “is England a country or not?” … which was what set me off to write the post in the first place.
@Ant: I’ve never come across “The Island” … have you got any references to this?
@Oona: Colloquial and historical place names and geographies are great. Just because an organisation doesn’t formally recognise a place name doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist out there in the world. I feel another blog post coming on …
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