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The United Kingdom is four countries that share a road network, and the tier everything about it is counted in is the twelve you see here: England's nine regions, plus Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Three of the twelve announce themselves on every sign they own, and the other nine have to be read off brick, stone, hills and a number plate. This page is the twelve, the groups worth learning them in, and what puts you inside one from a photograph.
The United Kingdom has no single administrative map. It has four countries, and each of them is divided differently underneath: England into regions, counties and districts, Scotland into 32 council areas, Wales into 22 principal areas and Northern Ireland into 11 districts. The twelve here are the one layer that covers all four and means the same thing everywhere, which is why every national figure is published in them.
England's nine are statistical regions with almost no government of their own. They were drawn as government office regions in 1994, briefly had assemblies proposed for them, and today the boundaries are what the census, the labour market survey, the house price index and the weather forecast are all broken down by. London is the exception with a mayor and an assembly; the other eight have no single body over them at all. That does not make them arbitrary. Every one of them is built out of whole counties, and they follow the lines anybody in the country would draw anyway.
The other three are countries with parliaments. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each have a devolved legislature with real powers over transport, health, education and, crucially for anybody reading a photograph, road signs and speed limits. This is why the border between England and Wales is the sharpest administrative line in the country to spot and the border between the North West and the West Midlands is nearly impossible.
The acronyms move and the map does not. These twelve were the UK's NUTS 1 regions while it was in the EU, and are now called ITL 1, for International Territorial Levels. The codes changed from UKC through UKN to TLC through TLN. The boundaries did not change at all, so an older map labelled NUTS 1 is the same map.
The traps are mostly about where the lines actually fall.
Yorkshire and the Humber is not Yorkshire. It takes in North and North East Lincolnshire on the south bank of the Humber, which nobody in Lincolnshire calls Yorkshire, and it leaves out the part of the old West Riding around Saddleworth that is now in the North West. Lincolnshire proper, the county, is East Midlands.
The East of England reaches further south and west than it sounds. It is Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Peterborough, so it comes right down to the edge of London and it includes places most people file under the home counties.
The South East wraps around London on three sides and reaches from Milton Keynes in the north to the Isle of Wight in the south, taking in Oxford, Reading, Brighton, Dover and Southampton. It is the most populous region in the country after London and the hardest one to picture as a shape.
The North East is small. It is Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, County Durham and Teesside and nothing else; Cumbria, on the other side of the Pennines, is North West. Carlisle is 90 miles from Newcastle and in a different region.
Those four groups are this game's own cut, and they are not an official tier. The United Kingdom publishes exactly one grouping above these twelve, the four countries, and it is useless as a filter here because three of the four would hold a single region each. So England is split into the three bands it is described in anyway, and the three countries that are not England make up the fourth group. Each one can be switched on and off on its own in the game's start dialog.
Northern England is the three regions above the Trent and the Mersey: the North East, the North West and Yorkshire and the Humber. Midlands and East is the belt across the middle, the two Midlands regions plus the East of England. Southern England is London, the South East around it and the South West running out to Land's End. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is the rest of the country, and it is three quarters of the land area with a sixth of the people on it.
Wales is the easiest answer on this map and it is worth knowing why, because the same trick does not work anywhere else in Britain. Welsh is an official language of Wales and every road sign carries both languages, usually with Welsh on top. You do not have to read it: two lines of text where England would have one is the whole clue. Confirm it with a plate beginning with C, for Cymru, or with a 20mph limit on a street that would be 30 anywhere else in the UK. The trap is the border, which runs through farmland with no natural feature for most of its length, so a bilingual sign is the only thing separating Monmouthshire from Gloucestershire.
London is the smallest target in the game by a factor of forty, and it stops well short of where most people think it does. The boundary is Greater London, the 32 boroughs and the City, drawn in 1965: Watford, Dartford, Epsom, Slough and the whole of the M25's outer side are not in it. Inside, the giveaway is the transport system rather than the buildings. Red buses with route numbers, the roundel on a station, red double yellow lines becoming red routes on main roads, black cabs, and the only place in the country where a bus stop flag looks like that. Anything more than about 20 miles from the centre is the South East or the East of England instead.
The East Midlands is Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Rutland and Lincolnshire, and it is the region that loses the most guesses on this map because it has no edge that announces itself. It is bounded by the Peak District at the top left, the Wash at the bottom right and farmland in between. Place it by elimination. If you are on flat arable land east of the M1 and north of Cambridgeshire, with limestone or red brick villages and a church spire on every horizon, you are in it. If the ground starts to rise into gritstone and drystone walls, you have crossed into either Yorkshire or the Peak, and the Peak is still East Midlands as far as Derbyshire goes.
Twelve at the top statistical level: the nine regions of England, plus Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. England's nine are the North East, the North West, Yorkshire and the Humber, the East Midlands, the West Midlands, the East of England, London, the South East and the South West. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are countries rather than regions, which is why the tier is usually called nations and regions rather than just regions.
The North East, the North West, Yorkshire and the Humber, the East Midlands, the West Midlands, the East of England, London, the South East and the South West. They were set up as government office regions in 1994 and are now the standard geography for English statistics. Only London has a government of its own, with an elected mayor and an assembly. The other eight are statistical and administrative rather than political, and every one of them is made up of whole ceremonial counties.
England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are the four countries of the United Kingdom. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each have a devolved parliament or assembly with power over things like health, education, transport and road signs; England has none and is governed directly by the UK Parliament. The nine English regions sit below that level and have no legislature at all. So the twelve in this quiz mix two kinds of thing, which is exactly how the UK counts itself.
ITL stands for International Territorial Levels, the UK's own replacement for the EU's NUTS classification after Brexit. ITL 1 is these twelve nations and regions, ITL 2 divides them further into around 40 areas, and ITL 3 further again. The boundaries were carried over unchanged from NUTS, so the only thing that really changed was the codes: UKC to UKN became TLC to TLN. A map labelled NUTS 1 for the UK is the same map as one labelled ITL 1.
Not exactly. The region is called Yorkshire and the Humber, and it is not the same as the historic county of Yorkshire. It includes North and North East Lincolnshire on the south bank of the Humber, which were never in Yorkshire, and it excludes parts of the old West Riding that are now in the North West, including Saddleworth. The historic county survives as four ceremonial counties: North, South and West Yorkshire and the East Riding.
London is a region in its own right, and the only English region with its own elected government. It covers Greater London, which is the 32 London boroughs plus the City of London, and the boundary has been in its current shape since 1965. It is the smallest of the twelve by area by a very wide margin and the most populous of the nine English regions. Places just outside it, like Watford, Dartford and Slough, are in the East of England or the South East.
Start with the language on the signs: bilingual Welsh and English means Wales, and Gaelic beside English means the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Northern Ireland uses old style three letter number plates that always contain an I or a Z. In Great Britain, the first two letters of a modern number plate are a regional memory tag, with S for Scotland, C for Wales, B for Birmingham, L for London, M for Manchester and Y for Yorkshire. A roads numbered in the 7, 8 and 9 zones are Scottish. After that it comes down to building materials and landscape: red brick in the Midlands, limestone in the Cotswolds, gritstone and drystone walls in the Pennines, flint in East Anglia, granite in Cornwall and Aberdeen.
Scotland is much the largest by area, at roughly a third of the United Kingdom, followed by Wales and then the South West of England. London is the smallest by a long way: it is about a fiftieth the size of Scotland and smaller than several English counties. By population the order is almost reversed, with the South East the most populous of the twelve and Northern Ireland the least.
For other European administrative maps at this level, try France Regions, Italy Regions, Germany States and Poland Voivodeships. If you want the harder version of the same problem, France Departments and Germany Districts are the tier below in their own countries.
