Off topic nitpicking. Sorry, but this sentence is too often said or written without thinking and I have come to dislike its use:

you cannot prove a negative (Royston)

As a general statement this is simply wrong. Mathematics is full of proving negatives. The recent proof of Fermat's conjecture by a British mathematician was of course a proof of a negative. Each proof that a number is a prime number is a proof of a negative ("There is no integer except 1 and 22039 itself diveded by which 22039...").
Outside of mathematics this statement has often been discussed in philosophy with regard to the relative size of an element and the search space ("There is no (eleph)ant in my bath room").
There are many contexts in which the statement is correct but the person using that statement should say why they think it can be applied in a particular context.

Since the Midlands are a finite search space the first guess is that in this context the statement cannot be applied.

Stepping down from the soapbox, and on topic, I tend to agree with Richard Bridge's posts. But I know too little about the topic to do more than reading.

Wolfgang