biting, but.......greater manchester, cheshire, merseyside and greater manchester
or am i wrong?

That map has Windermere (the lake) in Lancashire but it is in Westmorland.

Absolutely right, it has. Here's a better map. That border should go round the bottom of Windermere.

That looks suspiciously like the Association of British Counties map.

Which is fine, except that ABC is a pressure group and has no particular right to assert that it's 1884 boundaries are any more valid or less arbitrary than the 1974 ones.

As counties were always administrative entities, and as, for an example, Lancashire has no administrative role in, say, Barrow, it seems fairly meaningless to describe Barrow as being in Lancashire. The boundaries were, in fact, officially re-drawn in 1974.

That map must be old because Coventry from that map would be in Warwickshire, but it is infact part of West Midlands

No they weren't. As the government said"The new county boundaries are solely for the purpose of defining areas of local government. They are administrative areas, and will not alter the traditional boundaries of counties, nor is it intended that the loyalties of people living in them will change."[/i