I shouldn’t have posted such an inflammatory comment, sorry!
However, having lived in the UK most of my life and having worked in various logistics and adjacent software businesses, I can promise you that wiki page is totally meaningless for almost all real world uses of the word “city”.
The problem is it’s a dumb historical definition if you go by what that wiki page suggests are cities. That old school royal city status in the UK is a royal honour, not a population threshold or any other useful definitely. It was historically tied to having an Anglican cathedral, which is why Wells (~10,000 people) and St Davids (~2,000) are cities but massive 200,000-person places aren’t.
Some of the most glaring offenders (Milton Keynes, Doncaster, Southend, Colchester) finally got status in the 2022 Platinum Jubilee round, but plenty remain. Here are the biggest UK built-up areas that are obviously cities by any normal definition but lack the title:
Northampton (~244,000) Luton (~234,000) Reading (~204,000) 150,000–200,000: Bournemouth (~196,000) Bolton (~184,000) Swindon (~184,000) Warrington (~175,000) Slough (~167,000) Telford (~157,000) Ipswich (~152,000) 100,000–150,000: Blackpool, Middlesbrough, Huddersfield, Poole, Blackburn, Crawley, Stockport, Basildon, Cheltenham, Gateshead, Birkenhead, Maidstone, Solihull, West Bromwich
That’s why using the EU definition of a city makes much more sense and makes things actually consistent Europe-wide, is what you’d use in any business / logistics application etc, so that dumb royal definition annoys me 😅 I’m also generally pretty anti monarchy (I’m Scottish) so that probably contributes to how salty I am!
Fair enough maybe I whooshed but it doesn’t feel like mildly interesting to me 🤷 more infuriating lol