These are digital boundaries for the system of burghs and districts of county essentially created by the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1929 and continuing to exist until 1975. Scotland was divided into Cities, Large Burghs, Small Burghs and Districts of County (with the exception of the counties of Kinross and Nairn, whose rural areas were not subdivided). These units generally functioned as sub-divisions of Scottish Counties with powers varying according to status, but the four Cities had full independence from the County they were situated within. This file represents the system as it was used to report the 1951 Census of Population. Statistical data and other information used in “A Vision of Britain through Time” can be accessed here: http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/data. This dataset is intended for researchers, students, and policy makers for reference and mapping purposes, and may be used for basic applications such as viewing, querying, and map output production, or to provide a basemap to support graphical overlays and analysis with other spatial data. Great Britain Historical GIS Project. (2009). Burghs and Districts of Scotland, 1951. University of Portsmouth. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/bh430th2587 Gregory, I, Bennett, C, Gilham, V., and Southall, H. 2002. The Great Britain Historical GIS Project: from maps to changing human geography.' The Cartographic Journal, Vol. 39, No. 1, p. 37-49. Southall, H 2012, 'Rebuilding the Great Britain Historical GIS, part 2: a geo-spatial ontology of administrative units' Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, vol 45, no. 3, pp. 119-134. DOI: 10.1080/01615440.2012.664101 This layer is presented in the WGS84 coordinate system for web display purposes. Downloadable data are provided in native coordinate system or projection.