“Our job is to get the message out. If we didn’t do it, no one else would.”Rivington Pike is close to Greater Manchester’s border(Image: Colin Lane/Liverpool Echo)

An organisation promoting Lancashire says it gets ‘annoyed’ when places in the historic county are mistakenly referred to being in Greater Manchester. Friends of Real Lancashire said “it’s amazing how many people just don’t get it at all.”

It comes as the group has been celebrating Lancashire Day today (November 27). The day commemorates the anniversary of when the first elected representatives from Lancashire were summoned to Parliament in 1295 to attend what became known as the Model Parliament.

Most of the northern and eastern parts of modern Greater Manchester – such as Bolton, Bury, Rochdale, Oldham, and Wigan – are historically part of Lancashire, while areas to the south and west, including Stockport, Manchester city centre, and parts of Salford, were historically in Cheshire and other counties.

Philip Walsh, Chair of Friends of Real Lancashire, said: “It’s amazing how many people just don’t get it at all. It annoys us to be honest when people refer to Lancashire as just the admin area. This day is not just about the admin area, it’s about the whole of the area. This day of all days.

“This is Lancashire day, it’s not admin Lancashire day, advertising a little bit of it – the bit in the middle as we call it – it’s about the whole of Lancashire. It’s important to remember historic Lancashire otherwise people feel left out.

“I think there’s a lot of people that still do class a lot of places as Lancashire rather than Greater Manchester despite it being 50 years since the formation of the administrative areas. We don’t really call them counties, we call them areas because we like to distinguish between the two.

“The trouble is the administrative areas are drummed into people and there’s a lot of people brought up to know nothing else but the admin areas like Greater Manchester. But when you actually tell them and explain it to them, a lot people say they didn’t know, even some of the older people said they didn’t know they still existed.

“So our job is to get the message out. If we didn’t do it, no one else would. The powers that be don’t recognise the historic counties. So it does annoy us really, especially on this day.”

Friends of Real Lancashire’s updated map of Lancashire showing their boundaries(Image: Friends of Real Lancashire)

Friends of Real Lancashire formally established Lancashire Day in 1996 to “promote and preserve the true identity of Lancashire” and runs events each year to celebrate the historic county. Each year, the Lancashire Day Proclamation is read out by town criers throughout the county and at 9pm Lancastrians across the world celebrate with a toast to the Duke of Lancaster – the King.

The Red Rose County was created in 1182 under King Henry II and traditionally includes Manchester, Liverpool, Furness and Cartmell. The Local Government Act in 1972 transferred parts of Lancashire to Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Cheshire and Cumbria, and incorporated parts of Yorkshire for administrative purposes.

However, as Mr Walsh points out, when the Government created the new administrative counties – including Greater Manchester – it said “the new county boundaries are administrative areas and will not alter the traditional boundaries of counties, nor is it intended that the loyalties of people living in them will change despite the different names adopted by the new administrative counties.”

He added: “It’s the importance of the culture and the local identity that’s attached to the whole country really. And it passes on through the generations as well. There’s young people who find it very interesting who were born in the so-called Greater Manchester and Merseyside areas that actually think ‘yeah we like this’ so they attach themselves to it.”

The organisation also runs the Lancastrian Awards and has created Ordnance Survey maps of Lancashire showing the historic boundaries that they sell and offer to libraries for free.