I have lived all my life so far in urban areas. We have always known the main shopping centres of these areas as "the village", even when I lived in Golders Green. Wikipedia talks about a village being bigger than a hamlet and smaller than a town.
Fair enough - so it's just a matter of semantics. I wasn't really thinking of 'urban villages' but, to be fair, each of the groups/estates of dwellings in the nearest 'city' (not literally true) to me (Milton Keynes, only around 60 years old) are officially called "villages" ....
It also says an area earns the right to call itself a village when a church is built.
I don't think that works, at least in terms of 'common usage'. My village
does have a church, but it is the "Parish Church" which serves around half a dozen other nearby 'villages' (within the same Parish), which everyone calls 'villages', despite their having no church of their own.
I'm not sure what the difference is between these urban villages and your "true village", unless by true you mean it has rural areas surrounding it, separating it from the next built up area. If this is the case, what I know as urban villages would have been like yours many years ago, but have since grown out to meet its neighbours.
Yes, that, together with population, is what I meant by "true village". As you imply, if one goes back far enough in time, such 'villages' were all we had, but when they expanded and merged with neighbouring ones, they generally came to be described as 'towns'. However, again, I have tio admit that circumscribed areas (particularly residential areas) within towns are often still described as 'villages' - albeit 'villages within towns', rather than 'standalone villages. In any event, I don't think that there is any doubt that the 'villages' in the area in which I live qualify as "true villages" per your suggested definition. This shows about a dozen 'villages' (including mine!), all well separated from one another by fields ...
The town where I live is Stockport, but this is made up of many villages that over the years have spread into each other. I currently live in Bramhall (and have done since mid-1999) and when we first moved in, there were 6 banks in the village: RBS, NatWest, Britannia (later Co-op bank), Alliance & Leicester (later Santander), Barclays and HSBC. ....
I would call any community which had 6 banks a 'town', as probably I would for any community of that size (over 17,000 in 2011 Census).
In contrast, my village has a population of under 600 and, to the best of my knowledge, has never had any bank. When we moved here about 35 years ago there was a church, three pubs and a village shop, and we have subsequent lost two of the pubs. The three closest other villages (all with at least a mile or two of fields between them and us) literally have absolutely nothing other than dwellings.
....But since the appearance of the railway in 1845, the village centre has migrated to the areas around the junction between the A5102, the A5149 and the B5094. ... There were a great many farms in Bramhall, up to the 1960s. We live on an estate built on one. .... But it gives you an idea just how much those fields have been developed over the decades.
A pretty common story, I imagine. However, in my area, the majority of the houses are at least ~100 years ago. In some of the villages (including mine) there was a bit of a flurry of building (primarily of 'Council Houses') in the 1960s but, beyond that, new houses have appeared only very sporadically. The planners around here are very strict these days, and will not tolerate any extension of the boundaries of built-up areas in rural villages - i.e. they will allow 'infill' building, but not anything that goes beyond the present boundaries of the built-up area - there has certainly been no such 'expansion of built-up areas' in the 35 years we've been here, and seeming not for decades prior to that. It therefore seems that there is very little risk of any of the local villages 'merging' any time soon(if ever)!
In contrast, one of the closest 'towns' to me (Bicester, in a different county, so different Planners!) has expanded dramatically - both the number of houses and population have increased almost 5-fold during the 35 years we've been here, so that it's 'boundary has crept appreciably closer to us (albeit still several miles away)
Kind Regards, John