More on Where is Bedfordshire

Last year I posed the question of Bedfordshire's place in regional history - midlands, eastern counties, home counties, etc.  A book from English Heritage has just come my way, although published in 2006, that answers that question by placing the county firmly in the East Midlands. 


It draws upon topography, forests and hills, settlement patterns, weather and agriculture to define the East Midlands region as running in an arc southwest from the North Sea coast of Lincolnshire to west Oxfordshire.  At its eastern and southern boundaries it excludes the Fens and the Chilterns, thus including the majority of Bedfordshire firmly within the region.  The exception is those extreme southern parishes at the intersection of Beds, Bucks and Herts, which fall within the South East region and the outer limits of the pull of London.

The book is a sweeping survey of climate, communications, settlements, housing, industry and religion over several millenia.  Despite this wide sweep, there is much to interest and instruct the historian of Bedfordshire, not least the importance of placing a county in its wider geographical context.  The maps, diagrams and photographs illustrate the text superbly.

The book:
David Stocker, England's landscape: the East Midlands. Collins for English Heritage, 2006.

The photos here, courtesy Ewart Tearle:
Above: a signpost in Toddington, Bedfordshire.
Right: Airship hangers at Cardington - a bit of modern landscape.

Regional history - where is Bedfordshire?

From time to time the editor of BHRS has been offered articles for publication and has had to turn them down because the Society has no plans to publish a collections of essays and does not publish a journal. It has been possible to suggest a few journals to which the articles could be submitted as there are academic journals for the history of most subjects and periods.

It was less obvious which regional academic journal would include Bedfordshire because the county can fall into a bewildering range of regions. Is it in central England, the Chilterns, East Anglia, the east midlands, the home counties, the midlands or south midlands or ... where? In addition to a journal's territorial coverage, authors also have their own definition of Bedfordshire's regional place so that, frequently, when looking for the Bedfordshire content of an article with an appropriate regional coverage, it is lacking.

At the Local History conference at the University of Leicester in July this year, I talked to the publisher of Midland History about this problem and discovered that I was talking to the right person. Midland History, published by the University of Birmingham is the place for articles about Bedfordshire. According to the publisher's information (Maney Publishing) -

"Its aim is to publish scholarly work on the counties of Bedfordshire, Derbyshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Rutland, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire. It is a refereed journal which prints articles on midlands topics: from professional and amateur historians alike, locally based and from overseas."

It would be good to find that in the journal's thirty five volumes there were a lot of articles specifically about Bedfordshire. But alas, only three articles had the words Bedford or Bedfordshire in the title. Is there anyone out there reseaching and writing about Bedfordshire to fill this gap?