Letter: Rush to decide future of county councils will create more problems

Sir: With regard to the abolition of county councils (22 November), it is perhaps worth bearing in mind that this will not lead to the abolition of the counties themselves. While you are quite correct in saying that shires had their origins in Saxon times, county councils date only from 1888.

There is, as far as I know, no suggestion of doing away with the sheriffs, nor the lords lieutenant. The counties will thus retain their ancient judicial and military identities.

The real enemy is the Royal Mail. In 1974 the Post Office made the quite unwarranted decision to adopt the names of the newly created local authorities as postal addresses. This led to the absurdity, for example, of describing a location as being in Hereford and Worcester.

There was no requirement for them to do this: Middlesex, for instance, had survived the establishment of the London county council as a postal county.

We can only hope the post office will take this opportunity to return to the ancient counties as postal districts, thus acknowledging a sense of local identity built up over a thousand years.

Yours faithfully,

MATTHEW ALEXANDER

Curator

Guildford Museum

Guildford,

Surrey

22 November