They have rows of shops and probably more than one large 24hr superstore. Many large towns have town halls and a marketplace. Towns are places which have usually grown up around crossing points of main roads, so they are easy to get to. Old towns would have had a market right in the centre. You would expect to find a hospital in a large town, for example, but not in a village. Large towns are places where people come to find special goods and stores. You will not find office blocks in villages and small towns. Villages and small towns are scattered all over the countryside and are surrounded by farmland. So, for example, Americans talk of 'small-town America'. In places which have developed more recently, people use 'small town' instead of village. Villages tend to be names used for very old (historic) small places and are common in, for example, Europe and the eastern (colonial) part of the United States. There will rarely be large areas of housing. There may be a few shops, but they will all be small scale. In places where people use the word village, they mean somewhere in the country where you can quickly get out into the fields. Different countries have their own legal ways of talking about villages, towns and cities, but most geographers agree on what makes up each type of place, so it is the geographer's view that we shall take here. A town is a word that we use quite often, but when it comes down to it, it is very hard to say exactly what a town is.

What is the definition of a township