Town twinning

What is town twinning?

Town twinning refers to reciprocal partnerships that promote cultural and commercial links between villages, towns, cities and local authorities.

The terms ‘twin town’ or ‘twin cities’ is used in the UK and Europe. Europe also uses ‘partnership towns,’ ‘partner towns,’ and ‘friendship towns’ to refer to these arrangements while ‘sister cities’ is more often used in the US and the global south.

In the UK, town twinning is an entirely informal and voluntary arrangement. There is no fixed process to be followed and no government guidance or legislation.

How to twin

UK town twinning arrangements are not covered by any legal provisions or code of practice. Twinning arrangements are up to the particular towns, cities or local authorities to decide.

Twinning has traditionally consisted of agreements (charters, contracts or memorandums of understanding) or school exchanges and meetings between business leaders, and council officials from each town meeting one another. There is no statutory duty associated with twinning, nor are there any current funding programmes directed at it.

Local MPs are free to lead or participate in establishing or bolstering a twinning relationship.

Is there a list of twin towns?

As town twinning is not an official process, there is no comprehensive register showing which towns have twinned and when. Twinning arrangements are reported on council websites.

The Office for National Statistics published a short article in 2020 on various demographic aspects of UK towns and cities that have twinning arrangements with European towns and cities: Twinned towns and sister cities, Great Britain and Europe.

Wikipedia provides a list of twin towns and sister cities in England but we cannot guarantee its accuracy.

There is no formal mechanism to determine whether a town twinning arrangement has ended or fallen into disuse. Several English towns and cities ended twinning arrangements in the early 2010s, as English local authorities faced reductions in budgets. Some twinning arrangements with Russian towns were severed or suspended after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, though others have chosen to retain ties in support of the people of their Russian twin.

History of town twinning

The earliest twinning arrangement is thought to be between Keighley in West Yorkshire and Poix-du-Nord in northern France in 1920. After the end of the First World War, soldiers from Keighley who had witnessed the devastation in northern France encouraged their local compatriots to raise funds towards the rebuilding of Poix-du-Nord’s community centre, which was named Keighley Hall in their honour. The arrangement was formalised in 1986 with the exchange of charters.

Town twinning increased in the aftermath of the Second World War, playing a role in promoting reconciliation and reconstruction in western Europe.

Professor Nick Clarke’s 2011 article, Globalising Care? Town twinning in Britain since 1945, provides a history of town twinning in the UK. Professor Clarke, a professor of human geography at Southampton University, observes that “town twinning was invented as an organised phenomenon in Western Europe in the period immediately following the Second World War” and identifies different approaches and reasons for town twinning. See below for more on the purpose of twinning.

Early examples of twinning

Examples of some early twinnings include:

• The Croydon-Arnhem link was founded in 1946 by a Dutch journalist, Albert Milhardo, Group Captain Cummings of Croydon and Alderman Lewis, with formal Deeds of Twinning (PDF) signed in 1985.
• The Bristol-Bordeaux Association (now the Bristol Bordeaux Partnership) was founded in 1947 after two friends, Professors William McCausland Stewart from Bristol and Jean Loiseau from Bordeaux, suggested linking the two ‘capitals of the south-west’. In the same year, Bristol also forged links with Hannover in north-western Germany, taking shoes to the city after hearing that in the bitter winter of 1947 many children were unable to go to school because they had no shoes. The Bristol-Hannover Council was established in April 1948. Over successive decades, Bristol entered into a number of twinning relationships.
• During the Second World War Coventry sent aid to Stalingrad (now Volgograd), another war-ravaged city, linking in an official “bond of friendship” in 1944. Coventry is twinned with 26 other towns, or cities, although it suspended the twinning link with Volgograd in 2022.

A 1971 United Nations General Assembly resolution (PDF) recognised town twinning as a valuable means of international co-operation.

Twinning in the 1970s and 1980s

During the post-war period until the early 1970s, town twinning in Britain was predominantly with towns in France and Germany, and occasionally in other European countries. Town twinning received a boost in the 1970s and 80s with the government-funded ‘Rippon Programme’ in 1972, which encouraged twinning as part of preparations for the UK’s entry into the European Economic Community, later the European Union.

Throughout the 1980s, UK towns and cities established additional twinning links for other purposes: to establish solidarity with locations in the developing world; to promote economic development links; and to support Eastern European locations after the end of the Cold War. The European Union's 2004 expansion led to many British towns seeking more twins in Eastern Europe after the arrival of new immigrants from this region.

Susan Hadley of the Local Government Association has described twinning in the 21st century as “no longer a marriage without divorce, but a practice of municipal promiscuity”, allowing broader knowledge sharing between more areas.

Purpose of twinning

In Western Europe in the immediate years after the Second World War various models of town twinning were proposed by different organisations. Professor Nick Clarke’s article “Globalising Care? Town twinning in Britain since 1945” details two approaches, the ‘bonding’ model and the ‘bridging’ model associated with the Council of European Municipalities (CEM) and the United Towns Organisation (UTO) respectively:

• The CEM approach saw town twinning as a device for bonding between people sharing similar characteristics.
• The UTO viewed town twinning as a means for bridging between different groups of people.

Both organisations were established in 1951 with CEM particularly interested in municipal exchanges in Europe and the UTO (now United Cities and Local Government) in promoting international links and world peace.

The CEM (now the Council for European Municipalities and Regions published a short research report in 2023, Analysis of Twinning in Europe (PDF), which concluded that “twinning remains a relevant practice with an effective and meaningful impact”. It found the majority of respondents wished to explore new partnership possibilities. However, “a shortage of financial and human resources, as well as a lack of knowledge on how to effectively engage in twinning activities” held back further development of twinning.

Twin Towns UK, a UK initiative from 2016 to 2018, organised by the Carnegie Trust, an education charity, paired towns across the UK with similar characteristics and socio-economic challenges to discover what benefits there were, if any, in learning about each other’s circumstances and responses to challenges. The project’s final 2019 report (PDF) highlighted environmental, social and economic benefits. This project was different from, but related to, international twinning.

Austerity and Euroscepticism have led to fewer local authorities taking up twinning and some have been silently “untwinning” for years.

A 2021 academic article by Dr Holly Eva Ryan and Dr Caterina Mazzilli examines the value of twinning in the UK and what might be lost by its decline. The authors argue for a broader understanding of the value of twinning. They note a trend for twinning beyond Europe and beyond towns and cities; trade unions, co-operatives, schools, hospitals, as well as other public services and technical bodies are now involved in twinning.

The report Moving Forward Together (PDF),by the same authors, explores the value of twinning and highlight common challenges. It makes six recommendations for best practice in the British context that include:

• Raising political awareness among twinning and linking groups.
• Examining opportunities and obstacles presented by the digital age.
• Establishing a UK-wide knowledge-sharing forum and keeping an up-to-date registry of active twinning, linking and friendship associations.

The complexities of international relationships established between towns and cities across post-Second World War Europe are examined in a 2023 case study of the Middlesbrough–Oberhausen Town Twinning partnership (PDF) by Tosh Warick; “From burgeoning youth exchanges of the 1950s centred upon reconciliation to twenty-first century regeneration strategies exploiting twinning connections to inform economic strategies.”

A Local Government Information Unit 2024 blog What's the point of twinning towns and cities? looks at the relevance of twinning and encourages local authorities to make the most of the tourism, business and knowledge exchange potential of twinning.