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England (Counties as in 1851-1901) => England => Topic started by: bugbear on Sunday 13 April 25 09:52 BST (UK)
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When decoding dubiously written (and spelt) place names from old documents, I would very much like to use wildcards, regexes and "sounds like" (SONDEX and others) on a list of known places.
Does anyone know of a large list of UK place names, ideally with as many old variants as possible, that I could download?
I have a collated list from the Facebook group "Place Names of England" which has around 30,000 names, that the best I've found so far.
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I don't think there is any one list.
I find the Towns and Parishes pages on Genuki useful, here is Northamptonshire's
https://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/NTH/parishes (https://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/NTH/parishes). I chose a part of the name that isn't so corruptible, and search the page for that.
For finding Civil Registration districts, there is https://www.ukbmd.org.uk/reg/places/regindex3.pdf (https://www.ukbmd.org.uk/reg/places/regindex3.pdf)
And for getting down to hamlet or farm level, I've yet to beat the maps at the National Library of Scotland, the 1880's 25 inch maps can be layered with satelite images to tell you precisely where you are:
https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=16.0&lat=52.13255&lon=-0.99086&layers=168&b=ESRIWorld&o=58 (https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=16.0&lat=52.13255&lon=-0.99086&layers=168&b=ESRIWorld&o=58)
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And wikipedia has list of places (towns, villages, cities) in different Counties, eg this one for Gloucestershire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_places_in_Gloucestershire
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Following up on PrawnCocktail's GenUKI link led in turn their source, which was this;
https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/data/#tabgb1900
That'll do pig, that'll do.