Home counties

The term home counties describes a number of English counties close to London. There is no precise definition, but the counties bordering London are most likely to be described as members, namely: Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Essex, Kent and Surrey.

Other counties farther from London – Bedfordshire, Hampshire, Oxfordshire, East Sussex and West Sussex – are sometimes also regarded as home counties, due to their proximity to London and connection to its regional economy.

The home counties come with a strong socio-economic stereotype, which characterises its inhabitants as comfortable, conformist middle class people.

The origin of the term "home counties" is uncertain. Marcus Crouch, writing in 1975, thought that it derived from the Home Counties Circuit of courts that had surrounded London since at least the 18th century. Looking further back, he suggested that it included the counties in which, since the Tudor period, it has been possible for civil servants and politicians to have their country homes and still be able to travel into London without excessive delay when they were needed.

The earliest use of the term cited in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1695. Charles Davenant, in An Essay upon Ways and Means of Supplying the War, wrote, "The Eleven Home Counties, which are thought in Land Taxes to pay more than their proportion, viz. Surry [sic] with Southwark, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Kent, Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk, Berks, Bucks, and Oxfordshire."

Later definitions have tended to be more narrow and Bacon's Large Scale Atlas of London and Suburbs (revised edition c. 1912) includes Berkshire, Buckingham, Essex, Hertford, Kent, Middlesex and Surrey in the "maps of the home counties".

In reviewing S. P. B. Mais's The Home Counties (Batsford The Face of Britain series, 1942), Norah Richardson noted that "the home counties" was a term in constant use but hard to define, but that Mais's definition of "the five counties around London County – Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Essex, Kent and Surrey" could not be improved upon.

The term is sometimes understood to mean those counties which, on their borders closest to London, have been partly subsumed into London. Indeed, the former county of Middlesex has been almost wholly within London since 1965 as have parts of Kent, Hertfordshire and Surrey, although the county continues to exist as a cultural and historic entity.^{[dubious – discuss]}