This town forgot to be a city

Rochester, in the south-east of England, was a city for nearly 800 years. And then, in 1998, an administrative error took that city status away, likely forever. Here's the story.

Research and script assistance from Jess Jewell

REFERENCES:

Additional research links:

(you can find contact details and social links there too)

[TomScottGo]

I've been struggling with this script for months. I even hired a researcher. Trying to distill this was really difficult, as ever there were some technicalities I had to gloss over, but I think this is as close as I can reasonably get!

[TheGreatCalsby]

I live in the town next to Rochester! I will stand where Tom stood and be, like, "wow, this is where Tom stood!"

[phen]

Tom Scott: "I was going to explain the history of what makes a city a city in the UK, but honestly, it was a bit dull."
Map Men: "Challenge accepted!"

[Tom_Nicholas]

Greater London (ie. the area we usually refer to when talking about London) also isn’t a city. The City of London (ie. the financial district) and the City of Westminster (both of which are boroughs of Greater London) are cities, but the metropolis we usually think of as London isn’t.

Also, I did some small amount of research into this as part of my PhD and I think I’m right in saying that having a cathedral or university has never been an automatic qualifier for becoming a city, it’s just that (in a precedent I think set by Henry V) places with cathedrals tended to be awarded city status. So it was a convention rather than a hard rule.

[tylernass]

If I were the British monarch, I would decide to abuse my theoretical power by arbitrarily making places into cities. Not only would this be hilarious, it would let the UK deal with the whole "what if the monarch decides to actually use those powers that they haven't used in ages and we kinda pretend they don't have anymore" issue on a fairly small scale. But I'd mainly do it because it would be hilarious.

[EngineeringMindset]

*Interesting fact* There's a sunken WW1 German submarine stuck in the mud in the Medway River (UB122) and a Soviet cold war submarine in Rochester (Foxtrot B49 U475)

[RegebroRepairs]

It's funny, because I've heard of Rochester, but never heard of Medway. Seems absolutely like that whole merging into bigger areas was messed up.

In Sweden, the concept of "city" was removed in 1971. Everything became just municipalities.


This annoyed Stockholm, so in 1983, Stockholm municipality simply renamed itself "Stockholm Stad" (Stockholm City). That pissed Malmö and Göteborg off, and they also promptly renamed themselves to be cities. Today 14 municipalities n Sweden claim to be cities.

[IanRubin]

As soon as you mentioned the minutes, this sprung to mind…

Sir Humphrey: “It is characteristic of all committee discussions and decisions that every member has a vivid recollection of them and that every member’s recollection of them differs violently from every other member’s recollection. Consequently, we accept the convention that the official decisions are those and only those which have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials, from which it emerges with an elegant inevitability that any decision which has been officially reached will have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials and any decision which is not recorded in the minutes has not been officially reached even if one or more members believe they can recollect it, so in this particular case, if the decision had been officially reached it would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials, and it isn’t, so it wasn’t.“

[martiansoldier]

A kind of opposite story:
Gibraltar recently applied to be a city to celebrate the Queen's Platinum Jubilee.
They refused to put it on the applications list because after doing research they discovered...
It had already been granted City status, and had had it for some 180 years!

[helios]

Thanks to you and Jay Foreman, I now have a strange interest in the regional policy of a country I have never been to.

[EpicOrchestra]

It's cool to see my home town though on a Tom Scott video, like these places I go past everyday, and then seeing it on a channel that gets millions of views, exposing it to them all.

[SerpentNinja]

I live in Rochester, if you ask any of the locals nobody will be that bothered that this place is no longer a city, but its cool to know that Tom Scott himself made a video about my hometown, i knew from the title alone that the video was going to be about Rochester given this place's history.

[agar]

GPT-3 almost exactly one year ago: "The Cliff that refuses to be a Cliff". Tom Scott now: "The City that forgot to be a City".

[lukeh]

As an American, it’s always so weird to me to see European countries just casually having castles

[Drake]

Gotta come back after Jay's video!

[Alex-cwrz]

As an example of how arbitrary the list is, I come from Bolton which is larger than all but ~17 cities, there's 69 in total ;) in the UK but it is still a town, said to be the largest town in europe by area (by population is different). It used to be even bigger 100 years ago as well, but was never made one. However St David's with a population of 1, 600 is a city.

[DampeSN]

As an American without castles everywhere, apologizing for _only_ having a castle in the background of your shot hurts me.

[sakkikoyumikishi]

"There's a storm coming tomorrow - it would've been worse!"

Indeed. Several of my friends who live in the same part of England have been losing power repeatedly during the last few days and had to cut up trees that fell into their driveways. I think that counts as worse 😂

[Crystan]

I lived in Rochester, and I have family there too. Literally only minutes away from the very castle and high street (well, if you can call Historic Rochester's modest shops a high street) you showed in the video. Know the area so well, it was like being back there. I knew part of the story of why it wasn't a city, but it was good to get more details on it. I never understood why they didn't just reapply for city status later, and now it all makes sense.

[macdeepblue]

This reminds me of my Town of Gilbert, Arizona. Gilbert has grown from around 5, 000 people to around 270, 000 people over the last 30 years but deliberately decided to stay incorporated as a town and not a city in order to sound more associated with small town, family community, and stay tied to its farming roots. As far as I know it's the largest town in the US and I'd be curious to know of other large towns like Rochester and Gilbert around the world.