South Hampton Roads

Virginia Beach is also the home of Joint Expeditionary Base East, operated by the United States Navy, which is located at Cape Henry.

St. Julien's Creek Annex is a U.S. Navy facility in Chesapeake on the Southern Branch Elizabeth River.

However, in the second half of the 20th century, an unprecedented wave of city-county-town local government consolidations took place in South Hampton Roads and on the Virginia Peninsula.

The South Hampton Roads region includes five independent cities, three counties, and three incorporated towns with a total population of 1,191,937 people.

There were also a number of political subdivisions which are now extinct, primarily due to growth and consolidation of local government (see section below).

The following is a listing of these 11 extinct shire, counties, towns, and cities, with the approximate dates they existed: Generally surrounded by water, the South Hampton Roads region is accessed from the north by a network of highways, bridges, tunnels and bridge-tunnels across the James and Elizabeth Rivers, the harbor of Hampton Roads and the Chesapeake Bay.

The area is bordered on the east by the Atlantic Ocean, on the south by the State of North Carolina, and on the west by several counties which are considered to be in the Southside Virginia region.