County in England
Warwickshire
Lawn tennis, the jet engine and rugby all have a claim to Warwickshire, and so does the world's most famous playwright.
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Key information
- County
- Warwickshire
- Nation
- England
- Population
- about 597,000, 2021 Census
- Known for
- Shakespeare, Warwick Castle, Kenilworth Castle, the birth of rugby and lawn tennis
- What locals are called
- Warwickshire folk (Shakespeare was the original Warwickshire lad)
- Famous people
- William Shakespeare, George Eliot, Rupert Brooke
- Football clubs
- Leamington, Nuneaton Town, Rugby Town, Stratford Town
About Warwickshire
The county that gave us three world-changing games and gadgets
Warwickshire has a habit of inventing things and then quietly letting the rest of the world take the credit. In 1823, so the story goes, a pupil at Rugby School called William Webb Ellis picked up a football and ran with it. Whether or not it happened quite like that, the legend stuck, and the Rugby World Cup trophy now carries his name. The oval ball itself has a Rugby connection too: the town's makers of match balls became famous for them. Leamington Spa, meanwhile, was where lawn tennis got going. In the 1870s Major Harry Gem and his friend Juan Bautista Augurio Perera played a lawn game on a court in the town, and in 1872 they helped found what is usually called the world's first lawn tennis club. And at Rugby, in 1937, an experimental jet engine designed by Frank Whittle was run at the British Thomson-Houston works. It was the start of the jet age.
Why the whole world knows Stratford-upon-Avon
William Shakespeare was born in Stratford in April 1564, and he was buried there in 1616. He is the reason millions of people arrive in a small market town on the River Avon each year. The half-timbered birthplace on Henley Street is the obvious stop. Holy Trinity Church, where he lies, sits quietly beside the river. Today the Royal Shakespeare Company has its home in the town, and the riverside theatre is visible from a long way off. The Shakespeare industry is older than you might expect. In 1769 the actor David Garrick staged a grand Shakespeare Jubilee in the town, just over a century and a half after the playwright's death. It rained a lot, but it set the pattern for everything that followed. Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, came from a Warwickshire farming family, and the countryside around Stratford turns up in his plays again and again.
Castles, a bear and a kingmaker
The county's emblem is a bear and ragged staff, tied to the Earls of Warwick, and Warwick Castle is its grandest stage. William the Conqueror had a fortress raised there in 1068, on a bend of the Avon. In the fifteenth century it belonged to Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, remembered as the Kingmaker for his role in making and unmaking kings during the Wars of the Roses. Kenilworth Castle has a bigger tale of endurance. In 1266 it withstood a siege of about six months, one of the longest in medieval England. Three centuries later, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, turned it into a palace to impress Elizabeth I, who visited in 1575 for a lavish stay of nearly three weeks. Today the ruins still show it off. The county's other great set piece was a battlefield. In October 1642 the first major battle of the English Civil War was fought at Edgehill, in the south of the county. Neither side won clearly, and that told everybody the war was going to be a long one.
George Eliot, Rupert Brooke and the literary county
Shakespeare is only the start. Mary Ann Evans, who wrote as George Eliot, was born in 1819 on the Arbury estate near Nuneaton. She drew on the Warwickshire landscape and its people for Middlemarch, Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, and the Nuneaton area still celebrates its famous daughter. Rupert Brooke, the poet who wrote 'The Soldier' and imagined a corner of a foreign field that is forever England, was born in Rugby in 1887. He grew up there, and his father was a housemaster at Rugby School. That is a fair record for a county that had about 597,000 people at the 2021 Census.
A very large ball and a very old Shrove Tuesday
Every Shrove Tuesday, the town of Atherstone holds one of the oddest traditions in England. A huge leather ball is thrown down from a window on Long Street, and crowds fight for it in a mass scrum along the road. The Atherstone Ball Game is said to go back to 1199, and nobody is quite sure of its origins beyond local stories. The winner is whoever holds the ball at the end of the game. It is a loud and cheerful afternoon, and the whole town gets involved. Leamington Spa has its own claim to fame as well: Queen Victoria visited as a princess in 1830, and in 1838 she granted the town the right to be called Royal. It is still Royal Leamington Spa, and the Pump Rooms and Jephson Gardens are reminders of the days when people came to take the waters.
Canals, cattle and county cricket
Warwickshire is the sort of place where a canal boat can drift past a Norman castle. The Grand Union and Oxford canals cut through the county, and Rugby and Leamington are handy stops for walkers and boaters. Farming is still part of the identity of the county, and Stoneleigh Park near Kenilworth was long the home of the Royal Show, which brought farmers and families from all over the country each summer. On the sporting side, Warwickshire County Cricket Club has been one of the leading names in the county game for well over a century, and non-league football keeps local rivalries alive in towns such as Nuneaton, Rugby, Leamington and Stratford.
Things to see
Shakespeare's Birthplace
Published
The house where Shakespeare grew up was once a butcher's shop, and in 1847 it was nearly lost before Britain scraped together £3,000 to save it.
Warwick Castle
Published
A castle begun by William the Conqueror once held a king prisoner, had unfinished artillery towers and now fires a giant trebuchet over the River Avon.
Related articles
William Shakespeare
Published
Shakespeare spelled his own name several ways, left his wife his 'second-best bed', and still gave English some of its most quoted phrases.