Thirty-four years ago a service was held in Worcester Cathedral to mark the end of Worcestershire County Council. Twenty-four years later Worcestershire once again became an administrative county.
Last Sunday, the county council attended a service in the cathedral, ten years on from that.
But Worcestershire didn’t cease to exist for those 24 years.
A county is more than its county council. It is a focus of local history, tradition, affection and pride, expressed through a range of local bodies and institutions, from county cricket clubs to county youth orchestras.
A sense of history and local pride is important for every community.
It engages people in the life of the community, and encourages them to serve it.
It helps to make democracy work and is good for the well-being of our local neighbourhoods.
Much is being done today to foster a sense of identity in Worcestershire and to celebrate its heritage. This is not just to do with tourism – just encouraging other people to come here.
Tourism is good; but fostering and celebrating a sense of identity is even more important for the people who live here.
We need to feel good about Worcestershire; and we need opportunities to express that.
It is quite easy to celebrate the past in a way which excludes those communities who have more recently made their home here. We sometimes speak as if England is unchanging, or ought to be.
In 1924, Stanley Baldwin, the MP for Bewdley, who is buried in the cathedral, spoke famously of ‘the sight of the plough team coming over the brow of the hill’ as ‘the one eternal sight of England’.
But there are no ‘eternal’ sights, and England has never been unchanging. The fascination of the English landscape is the way in which it has been shaped and re-shaped by succeeding generations and different communities; even by different faiths.
The constant enrichment of our society by those whose history and traditions stem from other parts of Europe and other parts of the world is itself an English tradition, and one which continues to flourish in Worcestershire today.
That’s a little of what I said to the county council last Sunday – if you would like to read more you can access it on the cathedral’s website
www.worcestercathedral.co.uk