DIAMOND JUBILEE 2012This year, 2012, the people of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland celebrate the 60th year of the reign of H.M. Queen Elizabeth II. Further details of the celebrations can be found by following this link: The Queen's Diamond Jubilee - celebrations and events(External website will open in a new window) |
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Information about English towns and villages displayed by County then Borough or District, or by Unitary Authority.
The Scottish cities, towns, villages and island communities displayed by Region, Community Council and Historic County.
The cities, towns and villages of the Welsh Communities displayed by County and County Borough.
Here we display by individual district detailed information about the cities, towns and townlands of Northern Ireland.
Use the link below to locate cities, towns, villages or other communities anywhere in the United Kingdom, the British Isles or its Dependencies or Territories, even if you don't know the whole name of the place or the correct spelling.
Cardiff
Edinburgh
London
The weather METARS displayed above are being generated by the British Towns Weather Station in Cambridge from information received via NOAA from official UK weather stations. We are now displaying the current weather conditions at all the major UK International Airports on the pages within this site. The METARS are updated automatically every 30 minutes from our weather station which is part of the St Ives website in Huntingdonshire and the district's four other principle towns being Godmanchester, Huntingdon, St Neots and Ramsey.
Click on the images, which have been uploaded by websites users, for a full sized view, additional description, picture credits and a link to the picture's physical location in the cities, towns and villages of Great Britain or Northern Ireland and possibly the visitor attraction or venue where they were taken.
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The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is one of the World’s unitary states and although the United Kingdom is listed as 80th in terms of surface area, it ranks around 8th in terms of Gross Domestic Product (Wealth) and around 5th in terms of military expenditure being a Nuclear Power and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. The United Kingdom in general terms consists of; four primary constituent countries; England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland., three Crown Dependencies; the Isle of Man and the two ancient Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey., and fifteen United Kingdom Overseas Territories; Anguilla, Antarctic Territory, Bermuda, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Military bases on Cyprus, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, Saint Helena & Ascension Island, South Georgia & South Sandwich Islands, Tristan da Cunha and the Turks & Caicos Islands.
A strip of water, only 21 miles wide, separates the French city of Calais from the “tight little island” of Great Britain. But the rough waters of the English Channel, the North Sea, Irish Sea, and St George’s Channel, which surrounded it, shut the people of Great Britain away from their enemies in the days of their weakness; and when they grew strong the sea furnished them broad highways by which they might carry on trade and commerce with other nations.
This little island – about two-fifths the size of France – which stands at the western door of Europe, has been favoured by nature in many ways. It has an excellent climate, neither very cold in winter nor very hot in summer, and with an abundance of rainfall. Its broad deep rivers – the Thames, Severn, Humber, Mersey, and Clyde – admit ships a considerable distance into the land. On its fertile soil can be grown most crops of the temperate zone. And in its mountainous regions of the north and west were to be found unsurpassed deposits of coal and much iron, without which Great Britain could never grown to be a once major industrial nation. In her 88,745 square miles there is almost every kind of land.
Before 1707 Great Britain was merely a geographical name. The chief country in the island was England, to which Wales had been added by conquest in 1282; and to the north was a separate kingdom of Scotland. Since James VI of Scotland had ascended the English throne in 1603 as James I of England, the two countries had always had the same ruler.
But is has only been since the Act of Union of 1707 that the two countries have been united under the name of Great Britain. In 1801 another Act of Union brought Ireland, which had long been a dependency of England, under the same Parliament with Great Britain, and the official name of the country was changed to the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.” In this same government are included also the other British Isles – the Hebrides (Eilean Siar), Orkneys, Shetlands, the Isle of Wight, and the Isle of Man – and the Channel Islands (Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, and Sark).
The union of Scotland, Ireland and England is shown by the flag of Great Britain. Before the first Act of Union the flag of England was white, with a large upright red cross; that of Scotland was blue, with a diagonal white cross; and a red diagonal cross was one of the emblems of Ireland. In the modern “Union Jack,” all three of the crosses are united in a single emblem.
The division of Ireland to form Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland occurred in 1920 with the Government of Ireland Act 1920 (repealed 2.12.1999), followed by the secession of Southern Ireland from the United Kingdom as the Irish Free State in 1922. Northern Ireland continued as self-governing jurisdiction within the United Kingdom with its own parliament and Prime Minister. The self governing status of Northern Ireland was interrupted in 1972 but has been restored, after a few false starts, in 2007.
A full breakdown of additions and changes to the site can be found in the SITE NEWS
We have added live Twitter updates to all the local pages on this website so that you can see in real time exactly what is being said in all the towns and villages we display. If this works well we may add the Twitter updates to the Tourist Attractions and Event Venues pages too.
We are making some major changes to the local pages of this website to make the site much easier to use. We are removing items where there is no valuable information, the pages are not gone merely they will not show unless there is something for them to show! So from now on if we do not display event venues or attractions at a particular location then you can safely assume that we do not have details of such.
This gives us back lots of space so, in compensation, we are adding new information to the local pages like Topographical Features such as mountains, rivers and lakes and to help display these new items we have added new map icons in differing colours for the different items, green for geographic items, blue for lakes and rivers, etc. We are also adding little snippets of historic gazeteer information to many of the major towns and villages to help describe what the area is or was like.
We have done some in the Northern Ireland section so you can go and have a look to see what it looks like.
Newry and Mourne
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