Metropolitan borough

A metropolitan borough is a type of local government area in England. The term has been used in two different ways:

• from 1900 onwards, there were 28 metropolitan boroughs (not counting the City of London, which had a special status) within the County of London. These were abolished in 1965 and replaced with London Boroughs within the much larger area of Greater London.
• the current metropolitan boroughs are subdivisions of the six metropolitan counties, created in 1974. Originally these were lowe-tier authorities, but the metropolitan county councils were abolished in 1986, leaving the boroughs in charge of all local authority functions, and thus equivalent to unitary authorities.