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County Information curtesy of Wikipedia
The term 'Ceremonial County' dates from the Lieutenancies Act 1997, but the concept of the counties used for the Lieutenancy differing from those used for administrative purposes dates back much further - some counties corporate were appointed separate Lieutenants from the larger county (often the posts would be held jointly), and the three Ridings of Yorkshire had been treated as three counties for Lieutenancy since the 17th century. The Local Government Act 1888 set up county councils to take over the administrative functions of Quarter Sessions in the counties. It created new entities called "administrative counties" that constituted all the county apart from the county boroughs: also some traditional subdivisions of counties were constituted administrative counties, for instance the Soke of Peterborough in Northamptonshire and the Isle of Ely in Cambridgeshire. The Act further established that areas that were part of an administrative county would be part of the county for all purposes. The largest difference was the existence of the County of London, created both an administrative county and a "county" by the Act, which covered parts of the historic counties of Middlesex, Kent and Surrey. Other differences were small and resulted from the constraint that urban sanitary districts (and later urban districts and municipal boroughs) were not permitted to straddle county boundaries. Apart from in Yorkshire, areas that were subdivided were retained as a single ceremonial county. For example, the administrative counties of East Suffolk and West Suffolk, along with the county borough of Ipswich, were considered to make up a single ceremonial county of Suffolk, and the administrative county of the Isle of Wight was part of the ceremonial county of Hampshire. The term Ceremonial County for these entities is an anachronism - at the time they were shown on Ordnance Survey maps by the name 'counties' or 'geographic counties', and were referred to in the Local Government Act 1888 as simply 'counties'. Apart from minor boundary revisions (for example, Caversham, a town in Oxfordshire, becoming part of Reading county borough and thus of Berkshire, in 1911), these areas changed little until the 1965 creation of Greater London and Huntingdon and Peterborough, which resulted in the abolition of the offices of Lord Lieutenant of Middlesex, Lord Lieutenant of the County of London and Lord Lieutenant of Huntingdonshire and the creation of the Lord Lieutenant of Greater London and Lord Lieutenant of Huntingdon and Peterborough.
