Is it a village or town?

It just goes to show how we're all clumped together here in the UK on this relatively small island.

There are 14,859 in the small area where I live with the average age being 41---how they work that out I don't know. It's a seaside area.

A village is a small community in a rural area. A town is a populated area with fixed boundaries and a local government, do you have a town council? I’ve always been a city girl, what is life like in a village? I’ve been thinking during covid of perhaps moving somewhere more rural.

kitty I wonder if they use the term 'village' in the US?

I presume not fanny. My relative and I had a big conversation about it. The terminology just rather tickled me.

No, dilly, we don't have a town council but we do have Parish Council. I like living in a village but, because we are large, we have lots going on. We live near the centre of the village but I wonder if the people who live in the modern houses round the outskirts feel as though they live in a village?

We are a village of approximately 10.5 thousand, we have a parish council, mean age is 40 (from the last census).

I live in a market town. It has a population of approximately 4,000 people. We have a parish council, but no town council.
I wonder if the town designation is because we have (or had prior to covid), a weekly market with stalls set up in the market place?

Sorry, we do have a town council. My head isn't on properly this morning.

Americans also speak of little townships as cities. It is probably a throwback to the way America is a vast continent that was settled patchily in small communities, by people many of whom had come from towns and cities to find space.

Like you kitty we live in a large village ( not as large as yours population wise though) and we chose it specially for being a good size ( last house was in a hamlet).
It’s nice to have amenities and buses and so on, but once over a certain size you do feel there should be another term, something between a village and town....towvillage perhaps?

We live in a town borders of Liverpool with population 20,000 approx. I live less than half a mile of the original village where it all started from. Originally farm land. It’s population was then 6,000 the houses where built as an overspill from the city from the 1950s onwards.

I live in a small market town in the Pennines. The population is 4500. We have a market 4 days a week and a town council. A lovely small but very friendly town community.

I find it hard to imagine that a community of 5000 to 10,000 people is classed as a village. That size seems like a town to me.

We have close to us the village of Ripley which has less than 300 inhabitants (at the 2011 census) and a Town Hall!!!

20 years ago, I came to live in a large village, of around 14,000. It had a Parish Council and elected councillors to that and to the County Council. Now I live in a small town, with a Town Council and a Mayor, with councillors also elected to a district council. The village and the town are, of course, the same place with the same population, though there are applications for at least two new estates. We still talk of shopping 'in the village' - old habits die hard.

Some good definitions on this site (the aim of the site is to rent you a holiday cottage in Yorkshire, but you don't have to stray from the definitions page) www.gorgeouscottages.com/blog/a-hamlet-a-village-a-town-or-a-city

A settlement in the USA near to where I lived was termed a city with a population of 1585! My village in England has a population of 4675. I think they use the term village in New England states, but more often they are called towns.

I live in a city, but the inhabitants of each of its various suburbs refer to their own respective nucleus and local shops as "the village" There was a lot of grumbling from older inhabitants when a developer bought a large store in our high street, divided it up into tiny boutique sublet units and labelled the whole building "The Village". It was only a small part of our village! What arrogance!

Shrub I took visitors from the US on a bus ride round the county, in and out of little pit villages and scruffy hamlets gathered round farmsteads (in a common-or-garden service double-decker! We sat in the front seats upstairs - they were delighted.) They said they had so enjoyed their trip round all those cities.

I'm not sure what we live in, though we always refer to it as a tiny village.

It has a church and a 'village hall', which was a small a primary school in days gone by, but there are probably fewer than thirty houses here.

The population given online is 330, but that is for the whole parish, which includes a nearby settlement with a name of its own, plus another bunch of properties less than half a mile away in the other direction in a location that also has a different name!

We have a bit of an identity crisis, I think, but one thing I can say for certain is that we don't live in a town! 😅

A small settlement with no church is a Hamlet, or a village if it has one.

A town is made a town by Royal Charter, and nothing more, usually on the grounds that it holds a regular market.

A city is given city status also by Royal Charter, and does not need a cathedral. Liverpool has 2 cathedrals, but they are 20th century cathedrals and it was made a city in 1880, when it had no cathedral at all.. Hull has no Cathedral but is also a city. The smallest city is the City of London (pop approx 8000) whilst Greater London is the largest city (pop approx 8,674,000)

Things are a bit different in Scotland, possibly because our population is smaller. I live in a town with a population of between 4,000 and 5,000, and nobody would dream of calling it a village. We used to have a Town Council too.

Funny that this topic as come up because our local Facebook page has this as a raging argument at the moment! It was a small northern mill working village, with a population of about 3000, up until the 1970s and was run by a parish council. But since then, building has massively increased, the population as grown to 10,000+ and we are now within the remit of a huge council who allow more and more housing developments to be built and have built a town hall, library and leisure centre. But the "old timers" who have lived here for many generations, still refer to it as a village. and become very cross when they're told it's now a town!

We always used to say a Hamlet was smaller than a village, a town had an established market and town hall. City had a cathedral. But many villages have "markets" these days and very few towns have the old fashioned market selling cattle etc.
So no idea how they would manage to define them now other than population, but so many villages suddenly double in size with new housing crammed into every nook and cranny.
I am from the Glastonbury/Street area originally and even though they are similar sizes Street is still classed as a village and Glastonbury a town.