Cotswold District
Cotswold is a local government district in Gloucestershire in England. It is named after the wider Cotswolds region. Its main town is Cirencester.
It was formed on 1 April 1974 by the merger of the urban district of Cirencester with Cirencester Rural District, North Cotswold Rural District, Northleach Rural District and Tetbury Rural District. The population of the District at the time of the 2011 Census was about 83,000.
Eighty per cent of the district lies within the River Thames catchment area, with the Thames itself and several tributaries including the River Windrush and River Leach running through the district. Lechlade in an important point on the river as the upstream limit of navigation. In the 2007 floods in the UK, rivers were the source of flooding of 53 per cent of the locations affected and the Thames at Lechlade reached record levels with over 100 reports of flooding.
The District is spread over 450 square miles, with some 80% of the land located within the Cotswold Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The much larger area referred to as the Cotswolds encompasses nearly 800 square miles, over five counties: Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Wiltshire, and Worcestershire. This large Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty had a population of 139,000 in 2016.
