Administrative Boundary of Gloucestershire

About Gloucestershire

Gloucestershire is a county in the South West of England. Covering approximately 2,654 square kilometres from the Cotswold Hills in the east to the Severn Estuary and the Forest of Dean in the west, Gloucestershire had a population of approximately 640,000 at the 2021 Census. The county contains some of the most celebrated Cotswold villages and market towns in England, the Norman cathedral and Victorian dock complex of Gloucester, the Regency spa town and festival centre of Cheltenham, the ancient royal forest of the Forest of Dean with its unique free miners tradition, and the remarkable natural phenomenon of the Severn Bore. The Cotswolds The northern and eastern Cotswolds — the limestone plateau and its escarpment that extends from Chipping Campden in the north to Cirencester in the south — are among the most visited and celebrated rural landscapes in England. The distinctive golden-grey limestone used in local buildings, the rolling wold farmland, the beech hangers on the scarp slopes, and the nucleated wool-trade villages and market towns create a landscape of exceptional character. The most celebrated destinations include Bourton-on-the-Water (sometimes called the "Venice of the Cotswolds" for its low bridges over the Windrush), Stow-on-the-Wold, Chipping Campden (the finest Cotswold wool-trade High Street in England), Burford, Bibury (Arlington Row cottages, perhaps the most photographed cottages in England), and Painswick. Gloucester and Cheltenham Gloucester, the county town, is one of the most significant cities in English medieval history. Gloucester Cathedral — the Norman Cathedral of St Peter — was founded as a Benedictine abbey in 1089 on a site of Christian worship since the 7th century; the cathedral preserves one of the finest Romanesque naves in England and the magnificent Perpendicular Gothic choir and cloisters, the latter rebuilt after 1351 in the earliest and finest example of the Perpendicular style in England (the cloisters were used as a filming location for Harry Potter). The cathedral houses the tomb of Edward II (murdered at Berkeley Castle in 1327) and was a major pilgrimage centre. Gloucester Docks — once the largest inland port in Britain — is a Victorian engineering complex of remarkable scale, now redeveloped as a heritage, restaurant, and museum quarter containing the National Waterways Museum. Cheltenham is one of the most complete and elegant Regency spa towns in England, developed rapidly after the discovery of chalybeate springs in 1716 with a magnificent array of Regency terraces, colonnades, and public buildings. The Cheltenham Festival of Literature (one of Britain's most prestigious) and the Cheltenham Races (the Gold Cup, the Champion Hurdle) make the town an important annual event destination. The Forest of Dean and the Severn Bore The Forest of Dean, an ancient royal hunting forest covering approximately 110 square kilometres on the peninsula between the Wye and Severn rivers, is the home of the free miners — a community of men, born within the Hundred of St Briavels and having worked a year and a day in a coal or iron mine, who hold the hereditary right to mine the forest's coal and iron under ancient legislation. The Severn Bore — a tidal bore on the River Severn — is one of the world's largest; at the largest tides, the bore can be over 2 metres high and travels at up to 21 kilometres per hour. GIS and Boundary Data The administrative boundary of Gloucestershire County Council is available for free download in GeoJSON and KML formats, sourced from the ONS Open Geography Portal (Crown copyright 2024). Compatible with QGIS, ArcGIS, Mapbox, and Google Earth, the dataset supports Cotswold conservation, cathedral heritage management, Victorian docks planning, forest ecology, and demographic analysis across the Gloucestershire local authority area.

📍 Administrative boundary of Gloucestershire county