It is a very windy day here here in Rochester, in the south-east of England,
and the only place I could find to film where my tripod wasn't getting blown over
was sheltered here by the castle walls,
so apologies that the background isn't quite as picturesque as it usually is.
I've got a story for you.
I actually cut three whole paragraphs from the start of my script for this.
'Cos I was going to explain the history of what makes a city a city in the UK,
but honestly, it was a bit dull!
And the actual story here is how a local government tried to save a bit of money
and ended up losing a status symbol that was nearly 800 years old.
The only thing I need to cover first is that,
after centuries of changes to the rules,
the British definition of a city now, in the 21st century,
is that a city is a city because "it's on the government's list of cities".
That's it. That's the whole definition!
Despite what many people think, it's got nothing to do with
size, or power, or population, or cathedrals, or castles, or universities, or history.
Those might be reasons that a city was put on the list centuries in the past,
but these days the only rule is:
is it on the government's list?
And new cities get added to the list because the Queen says so.
Usually when there's some big national celebration.
Sometimes there'll be a competition and bidding process,
and a few dozen towns and villages will file paperwork
saying why they should get "city status".
The decision's actually taken by government ministers, of course,
the Queen just approves it, but officially:
the Queen says "that one!",
and that's a city now.
That was a really bad impression of the Queen.
So the people of Rochester were quite surprised in 2002
when they discovered that Rochester was no longer on the list.
It hadn't been for four years.
And they were now just living in a regular town, not a city.
Not because they'd angered the Queen, although that would have been fun,
but apparently because someone forgot to file some paperwork.
Rochester had been a city since the 13th century,
when its cathedral was consecrated.
And that made sense when there was A Cathedral, and
a small town around it, and then countryside.
But by the 1970s, urban expansion had merged the string of towns
along this bit of the Medway river.
Strood, Rochester, Chatham:
they were all one big conglomeration, joined up together.
So in 1974 as part of national reforms, all those local governments were merged too,
legally becoming the Borough of Medway.
Rochester as an actual legal Place With A Local Government...
...was no more.
But the Queen issued some special paperwork called Letters Patent that said,
yes, okay, fine, Rochester, the part that's been a city for 800 years,
that can still be a city.
Which would've have been fine.
A few years later, the local government then petitioned to extend that city status
to the whole borough, calling it Rochester-upon-Medway.
Great big city. Covers the whole area.
And it's not tied to the old city boundaries any more,
it's tied to the local government district instead.
Which probably seemed like a good idea at the time.
Until 1998, when districts were due to be merged again
in another local government reshuffle.
The towns of Gillingham and Rainham were going to be connected in,
and the whole area would legally become known as just Medway.
And by that time, the rules had changed.
To stay a city they didn't just need a bit of paperwork from the Queen.
The local council had to appoint "Charter Trustees",
a group to represent the original city.
The cost was estimated at about £60,000.
Exactly what happened next depends on who you ask, and when you asked it.
No-one seemed to notice at all until four years after the reshuffle,
when a local historical society spotted that Rochester...
wasn't on the list any more.
In news articles back then, it was put down to an administrative error.
But a few years ago, one party's politicians dug through some paperwork,
looked through some minutes of meetings,
and blamed the other side for doing it as a deliberate policy.
A Freedom of Information Request pulled the minutes from the archives into public view
just a few weeks ago as I record this, and as far as I can tell they're inconclusive:
it might be that the council didn't understand the consequences,
it might have been that no-one wanted to pay for it
and the buck kept being passed.
Now, there's a standard rule of thumb called Hanlon's Razor:
never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
But also, those meeting minutes are written
in exactly the sort of kind-of-ambiguous way
that I would write if I knew I was making a risky decision
and I wanted to avoid blame for it later.
The truth is probably lost to history,
because no-one is going to remember what was actually said in those meetings
more than 20 years later.
And even if they did, they probably won't want to take the blame now.
And now the city status is lost.
Rochester can't get it back.
Because Rochester isn't really a legally defined place any more.
Sure, you can type the name into a navigation app,
you will get here.
There are signs, you could probably draw some borders with a bit of research.
But there's no legal Rochester Council who could appoint those trustees.
There hasn't been for twenty years.
Medway could become a city. They've tried a few times,
but the Queen hasn't chosen them yet.
And Medway is not Rochester.
Does it make any difference?
Legally, no: village, neighbourhood, town, city,
none of them have any distinction in British law any more.
But one of those words makes the place sound bigger and more prestigious,
maybe being on the list would affect
whether a place gets investment or businesses moving to the area.
But it looks like Rochester will now forever be...
well, arguably? Not even a town.
Just a neighbourhood of Medway.
A very very windy neighbourhood of Medway!
There's a storm coming tomorrow, it would've been worse.