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Saturday, October 02, 2010

City status - need I say more! - Memorandum from City of Rochester Society on Medway Council's proposal to apply for city status.

    

Memorandum from the City of Rochester Society on Medway Council's proposal to apply for city status

Background
Rochester's historic city status was allowed to lapse when Medway Unitary
Authority was formed.Since this decision was discovered, the City of 
Rochester Society has been investigating whether, and if so how, 
city status  can be regained. Medway Council has also endeavoured 
to reverse the decision made by its predecessors, making 
approaches to central government's Constitution Unit, so far without
success. Now, in anticipation that new cities may be created as part 
of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012, Medway 
Council has  announced its intention of making an application in 
respect of the entire borough which, if successful, would become 
the City of Medway.

The Society's findings

For centuries it was accepted that a town which was the seat of a
bishopric, and so contained a cathedral, would have the status of 
a city. This stemmed from the fact that the earliest bishoprics were
settled upon the most important and well-established towns in the 
kingdom, usually those of Roman or pre-Roman origin.There 
are no records of city status having been formally bestowed upon 
these towns at any time, though their status was accepted and 
reaffirmed by Royal charters through the centuries. In the course 
of a local government review in 1927 these towns, including 
Rochester, were described as cities 'by ancient prescriptive
right'.

In addition to these historic cities, large new industrial towns 
developed in the 19th century some of which sought, and were 
granted, city status. Other towns became the seats of newly 
created bishoprics and cathedrals were built (e.g. in Guildford 
and Chelmsford) but as yet they do not have city status. 
The automatic link between city and diocese was broken.

Local government boundary changes in the 1970s created a 
requirement to maintain the status for cities which were being 
incorporated into the newly formed, larger districts. Initially 
Rochester's status was upheld by 'Special Letters Patent' 
granted by the Queen at the request of the outgoing city council. 
When, in 1982, Medway Borough Council expressed an interest 
in obtaining city status for itself, a compromise was reached 
with a name change to Rochester upon Medway. A further 
application was then made to the Queen and Rochester's 
historic status was extended to the whole of the Borough. 
However, when the unitary authority was formed in 1997 
 Rochester was not included in the title and no other action
was taken - such as the appointment of charter trustees - to 
uphold city status.

City status is granted very sparingly and there are no hard and
fast rules; applicants have to make the best case they can citing 
the attributes of their particular town or, in some cases, group of
towns (e.g. Stoke on Trent, a city of six towns). The one fact, 
however, which does emerge is that city status has,to date, 
only been granted in the name of established towns. Unless 
there is a change of policy, it is unlikely that city status would
be granted under a name otherwise borne only by a river and a
recently created local government district, such as Medway. 
 It is also worth bearing in mind that the Yorkshire city generally 
known as Hull has the formal title of the City of Kingston-upon-Hull. 
This suggests that if a formal title of, say, Rochester upon 
Medway, were adopted for the Authority itself - upon which an 
application for city status could be based - there would be nothing
to preclude the continued marketing/promotion of the area as 
'Medway' in line with the Council's existing policy.

The Society's recommendation

The Society strongly recommends that in order to give an 
application for city status the best  possible chance of success, 
the Council considers altering the name of the 
Unitary Authority to 'ROCHESTER UPON MEDWAY'.