Middlesex, the Saxon county that London's suburbs swallowed whole
In 1771 the novelist Tobias Smollett joked that if London kept spreading, all of Middlesex would one day be covered in brick. He was right. The small county framed by the Thames, the Lea and the Colne was steadily absorbed, and in 1965 almost all of it vanished into Greater London.
The name means territory of the Middle Saxons, from Old English middel and Seaxe, the same root found in Essex, Sussex and Wessex; a 704 charter about land at Twickenham records it in Latin. The Saxons themselves were named after the seax, a knife, and Middlesex and Essex both carry three seaxes on their emblems, drawn by Tudor heralds looking more like scimitars. The Middle Saxon province seems to have belonged to the East Saxon kingdom, perhaps as the domain of one of its co-kings, a link that survived in the boundaries of the Diocese of London.
Exactly when the county formed is unclear, perhaps the early 10th century, but by the Domesday Book of 1086 it was split into six hundreds. It was England's second smallest historic county, after Rutland. The City of London became self-governing and resisted every attempt to extend its boundaries, so the booming districts outside it lacked proper local government, yet the City still named the county's high sheriff until 1889 and hosted its assizes at the Old Bailey. Middlesex never really had a settled county town. The Tower Hamlets in the south-east even formed a county within a county, with its own Lord-Lieutenant, and by the 19th century housed over a million people.
Reform came piecemeal. The Metropolitan Board of Works took on infrastructure for the crowded south-east from 1855, and in 1889 about a fifth of the county's area and a third of its people passed to the new County of London. What remained got its own county council, meeting at the Middlesex Guildhall in Westminster.
Railways, the Underground and the Metro-land housing schemes filled the rest with suburbs. In the Second World War it was bombed and hosted RAF Uxbridge and RAF Heston, both involved in the Battle of Britain. The creation of Greater London in 1965 then absorbed nearly all of it, leaving slivers to Hertfordshire and Surrey.
Source: Middlesex
