county of Lancashire. The urban district council was based in Royton Town Hall, which had been purpose built for the local board in 1880. In 1933, a part of the neighbouring Municipal Borough of Middleton was transferred to Royton Urban District. Under the Local Government Act 1972, the Royton Urban District was abolished, and Royton has, since 1 April 1974, formed an unparished area of the Metropolitan Borough of Oldham, a local government district of the metropolitan county of Greater Manchester. Royton has two of the twenty wards of the Metropolitan Borough of Oldham: Royton North and Royton South. In terms of parliamentary representation, Royton after the Reform Act 1832 was represented as part of the Oldham parliamentary borough constituency, of which the first Members of Parliaments (MPs) were the radicals William Cobbett and John Fielden. Winston Churchill was the MP between 1900 and 1906. Constituency boundaries changed during the 20th century, and Royton has lain within the Royton (1918–1950), Heywood and Royton (1950–1983), and Oldham Central and Royton (1983–1997) constituencies. Since 1997, Royton has lain within Oldham West and Royton. Until his death in 2015, it was represented in the House of Commons by Michael Meacher, a member of the Labour Party. Geography At (53.566°, −2.121°) and north-northwest of London, Royton lies at the foothills of the Pennines, roughly above sea level. The larger towns of Rochdale and Oldham lie to the north and south respectively. For purposes of the Office for National Statistics, Royton forms part of the Greater Manchester Urban Area, with Manchester city centre itself southwest of Royton. Described in Samuel Lewis's A Topographical Dictionary of England (1848) as being in "aspect rather wild", Royton lies in a shallow valley amongst undulating land. The sources of the rivers Irk and Beal are to the northeast and east respectively. The Irk meanders southwesterly into Chadderton, and then onwards to Middleton into Manchester before uniting its waters with the River Irwell in Manchester city centre. The general slope of the land decreases in height away from the Pennines, from east to west, but reaches high points of at Tandle Hill and at the summit of Oldham Edge, a ridge of elevated land which leads to Oldham. The soils of the town are broadly sand with subsoils of clay. Royton's built environment follows a standard urban structure, consisting of residential dwellings centred around a High Street in the town