Town in Northamptonshire, England
Northampton
A town where a king's statue wears Roman dress, an MP was barred from Parliament, and a lift-testing tower now watches over the shoe capital of England.
Key information
- County
- Northamptonshire
- Nation
- England
- Population
- about 249,000 (2021 Census)
- Known for
- Boot and shoe making, a huge Market Square, a Norman round church and the Great Fire of 1675
- What locals are called
- Northamptonians
- Famous people
- Francis Crick, Alan Moore, Malcolm Arnold, Charles Bradlaugh
- Football clubs
- Northampton Town (the Cobblers)
About Northampton
The town that put England's army on its feet
Northampton's story is a story about shoes. During the Civil War in the 1640s, the town was supplying the army with thousands of pairs of shoes and boots, and the trade never really stopped. By the Victorian era the town was crammed with workshops and factories, and soldiers marched in Northampton leather through the Napoleonic and First World Wars. The famous names are still around. Church's, Crockett & Jones and Tricker's all make shoes in and around the town, and the Museum of Northampton holds one of the largest collections of historical footwear anywhere in the world. It also explains the football club's nickname. Northampton Town are the Cobblers, a nod to the town's shoemaking trade, though the club's crest uses the town's castle-and-lions coat of arms rather than a boot.
A king in a toga and a town rebuilt from ash
In September 1675 a fire started in a house on the Horsemarket and tore through Northampton, destroying most of the medieval town centre. Charles II helped with the rebuilding, giving timber from the royal forest and relieving the town of its hearth tax. The town thanked him by putting his statue on the portico of the new All Saints' Church, where he stands in Roman dress, gazing over the square. The rebuild left Northampton with one of its best features: a vast Market Square, among the biggest in England, which still hosts a market and takes over for the St Crispin Street Fair each October.
Crusaders, kings and a bishop on the run
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is one of only four surviving medieval round churches in England. It was begun around 1100 by Simon de Senlis, Earl of Northampton, who modelled it on the church in Jerusalem after returning from the First Crusade. Northampton was also a place where kings held councils. In October 1164 Thomas Becket was put on trial at Northampton Castle by Henry II, then slipped out of town in the night and fled abroad. Six years later he was dead, killed in Canterbury Cathedral. In July 1460 the Wars of the Roses came to the meadows by Delapré Abbey. Yorkist forces won the Battle of Northampton and took the captured Henry VI to London. Nearby at Hardingstone stands one of the three surviving Eleanor Crosses, put up in the 1290s to mark where Queen Eleanor's funeral procession stopped on its way to London.
The MP Parliament wouldn't let in
Charles Bradlaugh, the radical atheist, won Northampton's parliamentary seat in 1880 and then spent years fighting to take it. He asked to affirm rather than swear a religious oath, and the Commons refused. He was thrown out, re-elected by Northampton's voters again and again, and finally took his seat in 1886. The town's other great sons took a different route to fame. Francis Crick, born in Northampton in 1916, went on to co-discover the structure of DNA. Alan Moore, the comics writer behind Watchmen and V for Vendetta, was born in 1953 and set his enormous 2016 novel Jerusalem in the Boroughs, the district where he grew up. The composer Malcolm Arnold, born here in 1921, wrote the music for The Bridge on the River Kwai. The poet John Clare spent his last twenty-odd years in Northampton's asylum, dying there in 1864.
Saints, Cobblers and a very odd tower
Northampton Saints began in 1880 as a team from St James's Mission church and now play at Franklin's Gardens. They won the European Cup in 2000, beating Munster 9-8 at Twickenham, and the Premiership in 2014 after extra time against Saracens, and again in 2024. Northampton Town, the Cobblers, have a wilder tale. In the 1960s they rose from the old Fourth Division to the First in just five seasons, reaching the top flight for 1965-66, and then tumbled back down. The skyline's strangest landmark is the Express Lifts tower, known as the Lighthouse. About 127 metres tall, it was built in the early 1980s so that lifts could be tested in its shaft, and it is visible for miles.