Confusion between cities and neighbourhoods in London

Hi,

I’m encountering some difficulty in organising neighbourhoods in London. Currently, London is organised into Greater London (region), London (city), and neighbourhoods that I’ve added like Brixton and Kennington. That all works fine.

However, the problem occurs when it comes to neighbourhoods in outer London, such as Kingston Upon Thames, Surbiton, and Teddington. When a user creates a new listing, Google maps/geodirectory appears to recognise these suburbs as cities in their own right.

However, this is clearly incorrect. Most people would not see any of these places as independent towns, but rather as suburbs of London (the city).

It causes confusion because if my users want to search for listings in London (city), they might well expect listings in these outer suburbs to be included. However, they’re not, since geodirectory has decided they’re cities in their own right. People will only see them if they search for them specifically.

My solution to this so far is merging these suburbs into London on the backend after they’ve been added, and then setting them as neighbourhoods. However, this doesn’t really work because even once I’ve merged them into London, if someone adds a new listing in a suburb geodirectory will create a new city all over again rather than automatically including it in the previous merge.

So my question is, is there a way to resolve this? In an ideal world, I’d like to take Greater London (the region) with its larger radius and turn it into London (the city), with all so-called cities within it absorbed as neighbourhoods. But that doesn’t seem to be possible.

I wondered if you guys had any ideas?