The County-class classification begins with a warning about later shorthand. The Washington Naval Treaty did not define heavy and light cruisers, although the London Treaty later made the distinction more formal and the Hawkins class supplied the British reference point. Britain would not accept a settlement that required it to discard the new Hawkins-class ships or HMS Hood, so the resulting treaty boundary should not be treated as an ideal design rule. Gun range, armour, and displacement all shaped the older ‘large light cruiser’ category. A simple label can conceal the design problem a navy was trying to solve.
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Why the Counties were not simply ‘heavy cruisers’
The treaty vocabulary behind ‘heavy cruiser’ is less straightforward than the later label suggests.