Northamptonshire County Map-Paper

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Northampton itself is the most populous civil parish in England, and (prior to 2021) was the most populous urban district in England not to be administered as a unitary authority (even though several smaller districts are unitary). During the 1990s local government reform, Northampton Borough Council petitioned strongly for unitary status, which led to fractured relations with the County Council. [ citation needed] During the English Civil War, Northamptonshire strongly supported the Parliamentarian cause, and the Royalist forces suffered a crushing defeat at the Battle of Naseby in 1645 in the north of the county. King Charles I was imprisoned at Holdenby House in 1647. [16]

Most buses are operated by Stagecoach Midlands. Some town area routes have been named the Corby Star, Connect Kettering, Connect Wellingborough and Daventry Dart; the last three of these routes have route designations that include a letter (such as A, D1, W1, W2). Stagecoach's X4 route provides interurban links across the county, running between Northampton, Wellingborough, Kettering, Corby, Oundle and Peterborough. After the Romans left, the area eventually became part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia, and Northampton functioned as an administrative centre. The Mercians converted to Christianity in 654 AD with the death of the pagan king Penda. [10] From about 889 the area was conquered by the Danes (as at one point almost all of England was, except for Athelney marsh in Somerset) and became part of the Danelaw – with Watling Street serving as the boundary – until being recaptured by the English under the Wessex king Edward the Elder, son of Alfred the Great, in 917. Northamptonshire was conquered again in 940, this time by the Vikings of York, who devastated the area, only for the county to be retaken by the English in 942. [11] Consequently, it is one of the few counties in England to have both Saxon and Danish town-names and settlements. [ citation needed] Melrose Plant, a prominent secondary protagonist in the Richard Jury series of mystery novels by Martha Grimes, resides in Northamptonshire, and much of the action in the books takes place there. Corby was described as the largest town in Britain without a railway station. [83] The railway running through the town from Kettering to Oakham in Rutland was previously used only by freight traffic and occasional diverted passenger trains that did not stop at the station. The line through Corby was once part of a main line to Nottingham through Melton Mowbray, but the stretch between Melton and Nottingham was closed in 1968. In the 1980s, an experimental passenger shuttle service ran between Corby and Kettering but was withdrawn a few years later. [84] On 23 February 2009, a new railway station opened, providing direct hourly access to London St Pancras. Following the opening of Corby Station, Rushden then became the largest town in the United Kingdom without a direct railway station.The route of the planned High Speed 2 railway line (between London and Birmingham) will go through the southern part of the county but without any stations. [ citation needed] Buses edit The two main newspapers in the county are the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph and the Northampton Chronicle & Echo. [ citation needed] Television edit BBC regions Lincolnshire County Council". Thebythams.org.uk. 24 October 2005. Archived from the original on 6 May 2009 . Retrieved 25 September 2010. Rushden: A town and civil parish located east of Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, Rushden has a population of about 28,000, it grew as a town around the farming, lacemaking and shoemaking industries.

Northamptonshire Chamber :: Milton Keynes & South Midlands Growth Plan". 7 December 2009. Archived from the original on 7 December 2009 . Retrieved 20 January 2018. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown ( link) Between 1974 and 2021, Northamptonshire, like most English counties, was divided into a number of local authorities. The seven borough/district councils covered 15 towns and hundreds of villages. The county had a two-tier structure of local government and an elected county council based in Northampton, and was also divided into seven districts each with their own district or borough councils: [35] Council Most of Northamptonshire is served by the BBC's East region which is based in Norwich. The regional news television programme, BBC Look East, provides local news across the East of England, Milton Keynes and most of Northamptonshire. An opt-out in Look East covers the west part of the region only, broadcast from Cambridge. This area also is covered by the BBC's The Politics Show: East and Inside Out: East. A small part of the north of the county is covered by BBC East Midlands's regional news BBC East Midlands Today, while a small part of South Northamptonshire is covered by BBC Oxford's regional news BBC Oxford News which is part of the BBC South Today programme. [ citation needed] ITV regions HM Lord-Lieutenant of Northamptonshire". Northamptonshire County Council. Archived from the original on 13 May 2016 . Retrieved 19 April 2016.Stearns, Peter N., Langer. William L. The Encyclopedia of world history: ancient, medieval, and modern [ permanent dead link]. Retrieved 16 August 2009.

Johnston, Neil (2 August 2018). " 'Bankrupt' Northamptonshire county council may cut to legal minimum". The Times . Retrieved 9 September 2018. Hundreds of jobs are also at risk Sywell Aerodrome, on the edge of Sywell village, has three grass runways and one concrete all-weather runway. It is, however, only 1000 metres long and therefore cannot be served by passenger jets. [88] Media edit BBC Radio Northampton's Broadcasting House Newspapers edit Railway services in Northamptonshire were reduced by the Beeching cuts in the 1960s. [85] Closure of the line connecting Northampton to Peterborough by way of Wellingborough, Thrapston, and Oundle left eastern Northamptonshire devoid of railways. Part of this route was reopened in 1977 as the Nene Valley Railway. A section of one of the closed lines, the Northampton to Market Harborough line, is now the Northampton & Lamport heritage railway, while the route as a whole forms a part of the National Cycle Network, as the Brampton Valley Way.Bathurst, David (2012). Walking the county high points of England. Chichester: Summersdale, England. ISBN 978-1-84-953239-6. Northamptonshire County Council previously operated a comprehensive system of state-funded secondary schools. [71] From May 2021 compulsory education in the county is administered by North Northamptonshire Council and West Northamptonshire Council. The county is home to private schools Oundle, Quinton House School, Wellingborough School, Spratton Hall School, Northampton High School. From 1993 until 2005, Northamptonshire County Council, [42] for which each of the 73 electoral divisions in the county elect a single councillor, had been held by the Labour Party; it had been under no overall control since 1981. The councils of the rural districts – Daventry, East Northamptonshire, and South Northamptonshire – are strongly Conservative, whereas the political composition of the urban districts is more mixed. At the 2003 local elections, Labour lost control of Kettering, Northampton, and Wellingborough, retaining only Corby. Elections for the entire County Council are held every four years – the last were held on 5 May 2005 when control of the County Council changed from the Labour Party to the Conservatives. The County Council uses a leader and cabinet executive system and abolished its area committees in April 2006. Greenall, R.L. (1979). A History of Northamptonshire. Bognor Regis, England: Phillimore & Co. Ltd. ISBN 1-86077-147-5. .

In the 18th and 19th centuries, parts of Northamptonshire and the surrounding area became industrialised. The local specialisation was shoemaking and the leather industry and became one of Britain's major centres for these crafts by the 19th century. In the north of the county a large ironstone quarrying industry developed from 1850. [18] Official information on visiting and holidaying in Northamptonshire". Archived from the original on 12 March 2007 . Retrieved 6 February 2016. The county has an area of 2,364 km 2 (913 sq mi) and a population of 747,622. The latter is concentrated in the centre of the county, which contains the county's largest towns: Northampton (243,511), Corby (68,164), Kettering (63,144), and Wellingborough (54,412). The northeast and southwest are rural. The county contains two local government districts, North Northamptonshire and West Northamptonshire, which are both unitary authority areas. The county historically included Market Harborough and the Soke of Peterborough. The county's music and performing arts trust provides peripatetic music teaching to schools. It also supports 15 local Saturday morning music and performing arts centres around the county and provides a range of county-level music groups.Midland Championships". midlandchampionships.org.uk. Archived from the original on 6 June 2014 . Retrieved 12 July 2014.