Thanks for the correction but exactly how would the distinction you are trying to draw have made sense to people in the 1930s? I grant you that the text of the London Government Act stated (Section 1) that ‘[t]he whole of the administrative county of London, excluding the city of London, shall be divided into metropolitan boroughs’, replacing the vestries. But one can see from The Times archive that the 28 metropolitan boroughs created by the London Government Act (1899) were in fact regularly referred by journalists and politicians as ‘London boroughs’ governed locally by ‘London borough councils’. For example, during the implementation of the Act, The Times ran a series called ‘The New London Boroughs’ (I: 16 October 1900, 5; II: 18 October 1900, 6; III: 25 October 1900, 8; IV: 31 October 1931, 5) and covered elections to ‘The London Borough Councils’ (the title of an article from 23 October 1900, 8). Five decades later, an article on the rising political importance of the borough councils uses ‘metropolitan boroughs’ and ‘London boroughs’ interchangeably (‘The London Boroughs’, The Times, 31 October 1950, 5). The phrase was even included in the official title of the London Borough Councils (Women’s Disabilities Removal) Bill, which aimed to allow women to become metropolitan borough councillors (‘In the House of Commons Yesterday’, The Times, 24 May 1900, 11). The form the London borough of X was also already in use for referring to a borough council area, as with ‘the London borough of Finsbury’ (W. J. Jones, ‘Illumination in the Open’, The Times, 5 December 1933), 51).