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Flintshire principal area

Geography
Area - Total - % Water	Ranked 12th 438 km² ? %
Admin HQ	Mold
ISO 3166-2	GB-FLN
ONS code	00NJ
Demographics
Population: - Total (2005 est.) - Density	Ranked 6th 150,200 Ranked 11th 343 / km²
Ethnicity	97.8% White
Welsh language - Any skills	Ranked 12th 21.4%
Politics
Flintshire County Council http://www.flintshire.gov.uk/
Control	Labour
MPs	David Hanson Mark Tami
AMs	Sandy Mewies Carl Sargeant (Constituency) North Wales (Regional)
MEPs	Wales

Flintshire (Welsh: Sir y Fflint) is a principal area and county in north-east Wales. It is named after the historic county of Flintshire, which has notably different borders.

The principal area is governed by Flintshire County Council.

Contents 1 History 2 Geography 3 Industry 4 Fairtrade 5 Education 6 External links

The current administrative area of Flintshire (a unitary authority) came into existence in 1996, when the former administrative county of Clwyd was split into three smaller areas. The principal area was formed by the merger of the Alyn and Deeside and Delyn districts. In terms of pre-1974 divisions, the area comprises

• the former borough of Flint
• the urban districts of Buckley, Connah's Quay, Holywell, Mold
• the rural district of Holywell Rural District
• all of Hawarden Rural District except the parish of Marford and Hosley

The district of Rhuddlan, which was also formed entirely from the administrative county of Flintshire was included in the new Denbighshire instead. Other parts of the pre-1974 administrative Flintshire to be excluded from the principal area are the Maelor Rural District and the parish of Marford and Hoseley, which became part of the Wrexham Maelor district in 1974 and are now part of the Wrexham county borough.

See List of places in Flintshire for a list of towns and villages.

Flintshire borders Wrexham, Denbighshire, and the English counties of Merseyside (across the River Dee) and Cheshire.

Parts of Flintshire have major manufactuing indistries. Amongst these are a Toyota plant that manufactures engines, a Corus Group steel works, Shotton Paper, but most importantly Airbus makes the wings for the A330 and the A380 at Broughton.

There are daily flights of the Airbus Beluga transport aircraft of Airbus wings from Broughton for the smaller aircraft. The wings for the A380, which are too large to be transported by air use a multi-modal transport using Flintshire's roads, the River Dee and the port of Mostyn, also in Flintshire. The motto of Airbus in Flintshire is: "Without us, it's just a bus"; meaning that the parts that make Airbus aircraft fly, rather than just run along the ground, are made in Flintshire.

On November 19, 2004, Flintshire was granted Fairtrade County status.

Flintshire Local Education Authority manages 75 primary schools, 3 special schools and 12 high schools.

• Flintshire archaeological information