Talk:Southern England

Buckinghamshire

Not sure why there is spiel about Buckinghamshire sometimes being considered to be part of Southern England. There's no other fitting description for its location in the country. Written by someone on the south coast perhaps? Maramotus 20:43, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

See South Midlands. OK, not a common term, and (as defined by the government) only applying to the northern half of the county anyway, but it illustrates the impreciseness of definitions once you get away from the Channel counties. Vilĉjo 16:33, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

History

This article needs a section relating to the history of this region to bring it up to the standards of the Northern England article. Aidan Croft 16:04, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

dialect plagiarism

Somebody has taken the section from the Northern England article on dialect and altered its wording just for the south. I think that this person has little concept of geography, since the definition listed here would classify Leeds, Bradford and Manchester as the south. I'm not sure where the south started in dialect terms, but the Lume-Humber line was between the North and the Midlands. I'll remove the offending paragraph now, and see if I can find a suitable defintion for the linguistic south. Epa101 (talk) 22:04, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

I made that addition and retrospectively I agree that the description is inaccurate (as this would include the Midlands as well). An accurate line for the south only, hence excluding the Midlands, would run from approximately the Wash down to the Severn Estuary as shown in this image: [] However, I disagree that the paragraph on accents in the south should be removed because although it is based on the Northern England article by being the exact opposite of it it does in fact accurately describe southern accents. I do hope that you will be able to provide an improvement that covers southern accents in at least as much depth - I will keep an eye out for this. Kind regards, Aidan Croft (talk) 17:10, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

As a first attempt, click on the left-hand-side "maps" button on here. There is a red border going from Norfolk to Hertfordshire that is supposed to mark the difference in the pronunciation of "come". This is quite similar to the Wash-Severn line you mention. John Wells uses this as his guide as well on page 336 of Accents of English. He mentions the pronunciation of "bath" words as well, but opts not to use this as his definition. He doesn't say why explicitly, but I think it's because there are three main pronunciations of "bath": /a/, /a:/ and /ɑː/. There are only two for "come": /ʊ/ and /ʌ/. So, I'm prepared to agree with you on the Wash-Severn line. It's not exact, but it'll do. Epa101 (talk) 22:44, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Map of Southern England

Hi everyone, I've noticed the map of Southern England in the infobox mentions that the East Anglia area is part of the Midlands (since it is labelled in green like the rest of the Midlands) when the area in reality is also part of Southern England (even though some rare definitions include the area as being in the Midlands). So I would request anyone here or the author of that image to either please add a map with the officially defined counties of Southern England or relabel East Anglia as yellow on the current map as it is misleading. Many thanks. Broman178 (talk) 11:05, 2 August 2019 (UTC)

Anyway, since there was no response to this, I've just done the change myself. Broman178 (talk) 14:28, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Historic counties in infobox

There is a small group of editors determined to push the 1890s counties at every turn. The topic has been discussed ad nauseam and the consistent and continuing consensus is that this information has curiosity value at best. It certainly doesn't belong in the infobox in a section assigned to current administrative entities. Accordingly, I will be bold and take it out of the infobox and move it down the page under archaeology or something. If anyone disagrees, please take it up yet again at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK geography. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 16:14, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

Largest urban areas table - 2021 census

Unlike 2011, when the ONS kindly provided GNS codes for the urban areas, there is no such ready-to-use source for 2021. It is difficult not to suspect that they got fed up of the Colonel Blimp letters. The equivalent for 2021 is "Amalgamated Built-up Area" but they aren't named, just numbered. So if someone is keen to revise the "Largest urban areas" table post 2021 census, here is what you need to do:

1. Go to "2021 Rural Urban Classification". Office for National Statistics. 22 August 2025. Retrieved 20 December 2025.
2. choose "Related downloads" from the panel on the RHS and download "All Supplementary Tables"
3. In Excel, go to table 4A and sort it by ABUA number
4. identify the number for the core settlement and then collect all the settlements in that conurbation.

For a worked example, see Milton Keynes urban area#2021 (ABUA number 2987). It was a lot of work (maybe not so bad now that I've figured out the steps to take),but I don't have excel, so I'm not doing any more. If anybody wants to do it. I'll be happy to clarify. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 16:41, 2 August 2026 (UTC)