North Warwickshire

North Warwickshire is a local government district and borough in Warwickshire, England. The main town in the district is Atherstone where the offices of North Warwickshire Borough Council are based. Other significant places include Coleshill, Polesworth and Kingsbury.

The North Warwickshire district was created on 1 April 1974 by a merger of the Atherstone Rural District and parts of the Meriden Rural District (the rest of which was merged into the West Midlands county).

North Warwickshire is a mostly rural area with several small towns. The area historically had a large coal mining industry, but this has almost died out. The district is relatively remote from the rest of Warwickshire, as the county is almost split in two by the West Midlands.

The boundaries of North Warwickshire are similar to those of the North Warwickshire parliamentary constituency. However the constituency also includes the town of Bedworth. The local MP is Craig Tracey.

In 2007 the Conservatives took overall control of the Borough Council for the first time since the creation of the council within its current boundaries. The Council was retaken by Labour in 2011.

North Warwickshire (UK Parliament constituency)

North Warwickshire is a constituency represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament since 2015 by Craig Tracey, a Conservative.

Boundaries

1983-2010: The Borough of North Warwickshire, and the Borough of Nuneaton and Bedworth wards of Exhall, Heath, Mount Pleasant, and Poplar.

2010-present: The Borough of North Warwickshire wards of Atherstone Central, Atherstone North, Atherstone South and Mancetter, Baddesley and Grendon, Coleshill North, Coleshill South, Curdworth, Dordon, Fillongley, Hurley and Wood End, Kingsbury, Newton Regis and Warton, Polesworth East, Polesworth West, and Water Orton, and the Borough of Nuneaton and Bedworth wards of Bede, Exhall, Heath, Poplar, and Slough.

The constituency since 2010 has all but two wards of North Warwickshire.

History

History 1832–1885

The North Warwickshire constituency was created for the 1832 general election, when the Great Reform Act divided the former Warwickshire constituency into two new divisions: North Warwickshire and South Warwickshire.

Warwickshire

Warwickshire (ⁱ/ˈwɒrᵻkʃə/ or /ˈwɒrᵻkʃɪər/) is a landlocked non-metropolitan county in the West Midlands region of England. The county town is Warwick, although the largest town is Nuneaton. The county is famous for being the birthplace of William Shakespeare, George Eliot, & Aleister Crowley. Commonly used abbreviations for the county are Warks or Warwicks.

The county is divided into five districts of North Warwickshire, Nuneaton & Bedworth, Rugby, Warwick and Stratford-on-Avon. The current county boundaries were set in 1974 by the Local Government Act 1972. The historic county boundaries also included Coventry and Solihull, as well as much of Birmingham.

For Eurostat purposes it is a NUTS 3 region (code UKG13) and is one of three counties that comprise the "Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire" NUTS 2 region.

Geography

The county is bordered by Leicestershire to the northeast, Staffordshire to the northwest, Worcestershire and the West Midlands to the west, Northamptonshire to the east and southeast, Gloucestershire to the southwest and Oxfordshire to the south. The northern tip of the county is only 3 miles (5 km) from the Derbyshire border. An average-sized English county covering an area of almost 2,000 km², it runs some 60 miles (97 km) north to south. Equivalently it extends as far north as Shrewsbury in Shropshire and as far south as Banbury in north Oxfordshire.

Warwickshire (UK Parliament constituency)

Warwickshire was a parliamentary constituency in Warwickshire in England. It returned two Members of Parliament (MPs), traditionally known as knights of the shire, to the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, elected by the bloc vote system.

History

Boundaries and franchise

The constituency, which seems first to have returned members to Parliament in 1293, consisted of the historic county of Warwickshire, excluding the city of Coventry which had the status of a county in its itself after 1451. (Although Warwickshire also contained the borough of Warwick and part of the borough of Tamworth, each of which elected two MPs in its own right for part of the period when Warwickshire was a constituency, these were not excluded from the county constituency, and owning property within the borough could confer a vote at the county election. This was not the case, though, for Coventry.)

As in other county constituencies the franchise between 1430 and 1832 was defined by the Forty Shilling Freeholder Act, which gave the right to vote to every man who possessed freehold property within the county valued at £2 or more per year for the purposes of land tax; it was not necessary for the freeholder to occupy his land, nor even in later years to be resident in the county at all.