County in England
Northamptonshire
The county that gave the world Dr Martens boots, hosted the first Formula One World Championship race, and watched a queen lose her head in a castle.
Key information
- County
- Northamptonshire
- Nation
- England
- Known for
- Shoemaking, Dr Martens, Silverstone, Althorp, Weetabix
- What locals are called
- Northamptonians
- Famous people
- Richard III, Francis Crick, Alan Moore, Charles Bradlaugh
- Football clubs
- Northampton Town (the Cobblers), Kettering Town, Corby Town, Wellingborough Whitworth (the Flourmen)
About Northamptonshire
The boot that was born on April Fools' Day
The first Dr Martens boot was made in Wollaston, Northamptonshire, on 1 April 1960. The name 1460 comes from that date: 1/4/60. The boot was made by the Griggs company, and it went on to be worn by postmen, punks, skinheads and pretty much everyone else. That's no accident of geography. Northampton and the towns around it had been making boots and shoes for centuries, and the trade boomed when the army needed vast numbers of boots. Kettering, Wellingborough, Rushden and Earls Barton all had factories, and the county's craft names, such as Church's, Crockett & Jones and Tricker's, are still known by shoe enthusiasts around the world. The Northampton Museum and Art Gallery holds one of the biggest shoe collections anywhere. Locals were long nicknamed Cobblers for the trade, which is where Northampton Town's nickname comes from.
A queen lost her head, a king lost a war
Fotheringhay is a tiny village with a huge story. Richard III was born at its castle in 1452. On 8 February 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots was beheaded in its great hall. Almost nothing of the castle survives, but the church that overlooks the site is still very grand. The county sits in the middle of England, which put it in the middle of English history too. In June 1647, Charles I was held at Holdenby House, and was taken from there by Parliamentary soldiers. Two years earlier, on 14 June 1645, the Battle of Naseby had broken the king's army and effectively settled the Civil War. The Triangular Lodge at Rushton is wonderfully odd. Sir Thomas Tresham, a Catholic who spent years in trouble for his faith, built it in the 1590s as a three-sided puzzle in stone, with three floors, three gables on each side and a hidden meaning about the Trinity. Sulgrave Manor was the ancestral home of George Washington's family, so America's first president has Northamptonshire roots.
The grand prix that started on an airfield
The first race of the first Formula One World Championship took place at Silverstone, Northamptonshire, on 13 May 1950, and King George VI went to watch. The circuit was built on a Second World War bomber airfield, and the runways still shape its layout. Silverstone is now the centre of British motorsport, and the county is home to a lot of the sport's engineering talent. The Mercedes F1 team is based in Brackley, and several other teams and suppliers have bases nearby. Rockingham Motor Speedway at Corby, opened in 2001, was an oval track built on the site of a steelworks.
Little Scotland and the steel that crossed the Channel
Corby was a village until the 1930s, when a huge steelworks drew thousands of workers from Scotland. The accents and traditions came with them, and the town's Highland gathering still runs. Corby's nickname is Little Scotland. The town's pipe mill supplied some of the pipe for PLUTO, the pipeline under the ocean that carried fuel to the Allied armies after D-Day. Corby also holds the Pole Fair, held only once in a generation, a quirky old tradition with stocks and street parties. In a far more peaceful key, the county's canal tunnel at Blisworth is 3,076 yards long and carries the Grand Union Canal under a hill. The Canal Museum is in Stoke Bruerne, a village at the tunnel's mouth.
Spires, squires and the Spencer family seat
The county's nickname is the Rose of the Shires, and another, the county of spires and squires, suits it well. Brixworth's church is one of the largest surviving Anglo-Saxon churches in England, and the tower at Earls Barton is also Anglo-Saxon, from the late tenth century. At Geddington stands the best-preserved of the three surviving Eleanor crosses, which Edward I put up to mark his queen's funeral procession. The squires left some grand houses. Althorp has been the Spencer family home for centuries, and it is where Diana, Princess of Wales, was buried in 1997 on an island in the estate's Oval lake. Boughton House, with its many courtyards, has been compared to Versailles, and Rockingham Castle looks over the Welland valley from its hill. There are plenty of well-known sons of the county. Francis Crick, who helped work out the structure of DNA, was born in Northampton, and so was Alan Moore, the comics writer behind Watchmen. Charles Bradlaugh, Northampton's radical MP, fought a famous battle in the 1880s to be allowed to take his seat without swearing a religious oath.
Saints, Cobblers and a breakfast giant
Northampton Saints won the European rugby union's Heineken Cup in 2000 and the Premiership in 2014, the latter in extra time. They play at Franklin's Gardens. Northampton Town's football story is stranger: between 1961 and 1965 the Cobblers rose from the fourth tier to the top flight, one of the quickest rises in English league football. Northamptonshire County Cricket Club, who play at Wantage Road as the Steelbacks in T20 cricket, have won white-ball trophies including the 2016 T20 Blast. As for food, Weetabix has been made at Burton Latimer since the 1930s, so a very large share of the nation's breakfasts begin in Northamptonshire. Whitworth Bros mills flour in Wellingborough, while the separate Whitworths business, based in nearby Irthlingborough, is known for dried fruit, nuts and seeds.
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