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Canterbury Kent

Approximate Population: 43,432

Canterbury lies at the heart of the City of Canterbury, a local government district of Kent, in South East England.   It lies on the River Stour.

Originally a Brythonic settlement, it was renamed Durovernum Cantiacorum by the Roman conquerors in the first century AD.   After the Jutish settlement it became their chief settlement, whence it gained its English name Canterbury, itself derived from the Old English Cantwareburh (”Kent people’s stronghold”).   After the Kingdom of Kent’s conversion to Christianity in 597, St Augustine founded an episcopal see in the city and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury, a position that now heads the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion.

Thomas Becket’s murder at Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 led to the cathedral becoming a place of pilgrimage for Christians worldwide.   This pilgrimage provided the theme for Geoffery Chaucer’s 14th-century literary classic the Canterbury Tales.   The literary heritage continued with the birth of the playwright Christopher Marlowe in the city in the 16th century.

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Leicester Leicestershire

Approximate Population: 285,100

On 4 November 1530, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey was arrested on charges of treason and taken from York Place.   On his way south to face dubious justice at the Tower of London, he fell ill.   The group escorting him was concerned enough to stop at Leicester.   There, Wolsey’s condition quickly worsened and he died on 29 November 1530 and was buried at Leicester Abbey, now Abbey Park.

Leicester was a Parliamentarian stronghold during the English Civil War.   In 1645, Prince Rupert decided to attack the city to draw the New Model Army away from the Royalist headquarters of Oxford.   Royalist guns were set up on Raw Dykes and after an unsatisfactory response to a demand for surrender, the Newarke was stormed and the city was sacked on 30 May. Although hundreds of people were killed by Rupert’s cavalry, reports of the severity of the sacking were exaggerated by the Parliamentary press in London.

The construction of the Grand Union Canal in the 1790s linked Leicester to London and Birmingham and by 1832 the railway had arrived in Leicester; the new Leicester and Swannington Railway providing a supply of coal to the town from nearby collieries.   By 1840 the Midland Counties Railway had linked Leicester to the national railway network and by the 1860s, Leicester had gained a direct rail link to London (St Pancras) with the completion of the Midland Main Line.

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East Kilbride Scotland

Approximate Population: 73,796

East Kilbride grew from a small village of around 900 inhabitants in 1930 to become eventually a large burgh.   Behind this growth lay the rapid industrialisation of the nineteenth century which left much of the working population throughout Scotland’s central belt from Glasgow to Edinburgh living in the housing stock built at the end of that century but accommodating far more people.

The Great War postponed any better housing as did the Treaty of Versailles and the period of post war settlement it created. In turn this was followed by the Great Depression.   After the Second World War, Glasgow, already suffering from chronic shortages of housing, had to deal with bomb damage from the war.

From this unlikely backdrop a new dawn emerged which would bring East Kilbride to its unlikely success.   In 1946 the Greater Glasgow Regional Plan allocated sites where overspill satellite “new towns” could be constructed to help alleviate the housing shortage.  Glasgow would also undertake the development of its peripheral housing estates.   East Kilbride was the first of five new towns in Scotland to be designated, in 1947, followed by Glenrothes (1948), Cumbernauld (1956), Livingston (1962) and Irvine (1964).

The town has been subdivided into residential precincts, each with its own local shops, primary schools and community facilities. The housing precincts surround the town centre, which is bound by a ringroad. Industrial estates are concentrated at sites to the north, west and south, on the outskirts of the town.

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Garden Furniture Crawley

West Sussex

Approximate Population: 99,744

Although Crawley itself is not mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086, the nearby settlements of Ifield and Worth are recorded.  The first written record of Crawley dates from 1202, when a licence was issued by King John for a weekly market on Wednesdays.  Crawley grew slowly in importance over the next few centuries, but was boosted in the 18th century by the construction of the turnpike road between London and Brighton.   When this was completed in 1770, travel between the newly fashionable seaside resort and London became safer and quicker, and Crawley (located approximately halfway between the two) prospered as a coaching halt.

By 1839 it offered almost an hourly service to both destinations.  The George, a timber-framed house dating from the 15th century, expanded to become a large coaching inn, taking over adjacent buildings.  Eventually an annexe had to be built in the middle of the wide High Street; this survived until the 1930s.  The original building has become the George Hotel, with conference facilities and 84 bedrooms; it retains many period features including an iron fireback.

Crawley’s oldest church is St John the Baptist’s, between the High Street and the Broadway. It has 13th century origins, but there has been much rebuilding (especially in the 19th century) and the oldest part remaining is the south wall of the nave, which is believed to be 14th century.   The church has a 15th-century tower (rebuilt in 1804) which originally contained four bells cast in 1724.   Two were replaced by Thomas Lester of London in 1742; but in 1880 a new set of eight bells were cast and installed by the Croydon-based firm Gillett, Bland & Company.

The Coventry Canal terminates near the city centre at Coventry Canal Basin and is navigable for 61 km (38 miles) to Fradley Junction in Staffordshire.

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Garden Furniture Bath Somerset

Approximate Population: 80,000

Archaeological evidence shows that the site of the Roman Baths’ main spring was treated as a shrine by the Celts, and was dedicated to the goddess Sulis, whom the Romans identified with Minerva; however, the name Sulis continued to be used after the Roman invasion, leading to the town’s Roman name of Aquae Sulis (literally, “the waters of Sulis”).   Messages to her scratched onto metal, known as curse tablets, have been recovered from the Sacred Spring by archaeologists.

These curse tablets were written in Latin, and usually laid curses on people by whom the writer felt they had been wronged.   For example, if a citizen had his clothes stolen at the baths, he would write a curse, naming the suspects, on a tablet to be read by the Goddess Sulis Minerva.

The temple was constructed in 60–70 AD and the bathing complex was gradually built up over the next 300 years.  During the Roman occupation of Britain, and possibly on the instructions of Emperor Claudius, engineers drove oak piles into the mud to provide a stable foundation and surrounded the spring with an irregular stone chamber lined with lead.  In the 2nd century, the spring was enclosed within a wooden barrel-vaulted building, which housed the calidarium (hot bath), tepidarium (warm bath), and frigidarium (cold bath).  The city was given defensive walls, probably in the 3rd century.  After the Roman withdrawal in the first decade of the 5th century, the baths fell into disrepair and were eventually lost due to silting up.

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Solihull West Midlands

Approximate Population: 94,753

Residential development in Solihull comprises a variety of housing types, but features a notable preponderance of semi-detached, detached and town houses, with little or no true terraces.   Many of the larger developments were constructed between 1950 and 1970.   One of the earlier large scale developments centred around Beechwood Park Road and Stonor Park Road with new detached houses selling for £4,000 in 1952.   Chelmsley Wood to the north of Solihull town centre is a large 1960s overspill estate for Birmingham, and is currently marketed under the name of “North Solihull”. In the early to mid-1980s, the new Monkspath district constructed east of Shirley (and close to the M42 motorway) was the UK’s single largest housing development of that decade.

Solihull offers a variety of shopping facilities.   It has an open-air 1960s-style shopping centre called Mell Square.   In recent years, the town has undergone much development, and the High Street has been pedestrianised since 1994. On July 2, 2002, a large new shopping centre, Touchwood, was opened by Queen Elizabeth II.

Solihull is the home of the four wheel drive car manufacturer Land Rover and a range of other major companies.

The National Exhibition Centre, commonly thought to be in Birmingham, is in fact within the borough of Solihull, as is almost all of Birmingham International Airport and the ever-expanding Birmingham Business Park.

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Preston Lancashire

Approximate Population: 131,900

In the mid-12th century, Preston was in the hundred of Amounderness,in the deanery of Amounderness and the archdeaconry of Richmond.   The name “Amounderness” is more ancient than the name of any other “Wapentake” or hundred in the County of Lancashire, and the fort at Tulketh, strengthened by William the Conqueror, shows that the strategic importance of the area was appreciated even then.

In the last great Jacobite Rising, on 27 November 1745 the Jacobite Prince of Wales and Regent, Bonnie Prince Charlie passed through Preston with his Highland Army on the way south through Chorley and Manchester to Derby intending to take London and the Crown.

Preston was the first of the very few places in England where the Prince was cheered as he rode by and where he was actually joined by some English volunteers for his Army.   From 10 to 12 December the Prince gave his retreating Army a rest in Preston on their long, last and fatal retreat from Derby through Lancaster and Carlisle to their dreadful day of destiny the following 16 April on Culloden Moor near Inverness.

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Garden Furniture Bromley London

Approximate Population: 280,305

Bromley is an urban centre in the London Borough of Bromley and is listed as a metropolitan centre in the London Plan. It is situated 9.3 miles (15.0 km) south east of Charing Cross. The origin of the town’s name is from Old English brōme-hlǣwe, or “broom hill”, as supported by records of the name as Bramelewe in 1272. Other places with this name are from Old English brōme-leah meaning ‘broom clearing’ or wood clearing. Bromley was historically in the county of Kent before the creation of Greater London in 1965.

The town has a large shopping and retail area including a pedestrianised High Street and The Glades shopping centre. Bromley is one of the major metropolitan centres identified in the London Plan. The London Borough of Bromley Civic Centre is located in the town. The historic Wickham Court with its crow-stepped gable construction is located in Bromley. Bromley’s main retail rival is Croydon, to the west. Bromley is represented by Conservative MP Bob Neill.

There are two railway stations providing connections to the Central London. Bromley South is located on the Chatham main line and is served by fast and local services to Victoria and Blackfriars. Bromley North is located at the southern end of a short branch line from Grove Park from where connections can be made for London Bridge, Cannon Street and London Charing Cross.

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Newcastle Tyne and Wear

Approximate Population: 271,600

The dialect of Newcastle is known as Geordie, and contains a large amount of vocabulary and distinctive word pronunciations not used in other parts of the United Kingdom.   The Geordie dialect has much of its origins in the language spoken by Anglo-Saxon mercenaries, who were employed by the Ancient British people to fight Pictish invaders, following the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain in the 4th century.   This language was the forerunner of Modern English; but while the dialects of other English regions have been heavily altered by the influences of other foreign languages—particularly Latin and Norman–French—the Geordie dialect retains many elements of the old language.

An example of this is the pronunciation of certain words: “dead”, “cow”, “house” and “strong” are pronounced “dede”, “coo”, “hoos” and “strang”—which is how they were pronounced in the Anglo-Saxon language.   Other Geordie words with Anglo-Saxon origins include: “larn” (from the Anglo-Saxon “laeran”, meaning “teach”), “burn” (”stream”) and “gan” (”go”).  Some words used in the Geordie dialect are used elsewhere in the northern United Kingdom.

The words “bonny” (meaning “pretty”), “howay” (”come on”), “stot” (”bounce”) and “hadaway” (”go away” or “you’re kidding”), all appear to be used in Scottish dialect; “aye” (”yes”) and “nowt” (IPA://naʊt/, rhymes with out,”nothing”) are used elsewhere in northern England. Many words, however, appear to be used exclusively in Newcastle and the surrounding area, such as “Canny” (a versatile word meaning “good”, “nice” or “very”), “bait” (”food”), “hacky” (”dirty”), “netty” (”toilet”), “hoy” (”throw”) and “hockle” (”spit”).

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Garden Furniture Salford Greater Manchester

Approximate Population: 72,750

With increased competition from the towns of Bolton and Oldham, Salford’s cotton spinning industries faltered, and so its economy turned increasingly to other textiles and to the finishing trades, including rexine and silk dyeing, and fulling and bleaching, at a string of works in Salford.  For centuries in Salford, textiles and related trades were the main source of employment.

Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels spent time in Salford, studying the plight of the British working class.   In The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Engels described Salford as “really one large working-class quarter …[a] very unhealthy, dirty and dilapidated district which, while other industries were almost always textile related is situated opposite the ‘Old Church’ of Manchester”.

Salford developed several civic institutions; in 1806, Chapel Street became the first street in the world to be lit by gas (supplied by Phillips and Lee’s cotton mill).  In 1850, under the terms of the Museums Act 1845, the municipal borough council established the The Royal Museum & Public Library, said to have been the first unconditional free public library in England, preceding the Public Libraries Act 1850.

The effect on Salford of the Industrial Revolution has been described as “phenomenal”.  The area expanded from a small market town into a major industrial metropolis; factories replaced cottage industries, and the population of rose from 12,000 in 1812 to 70,244 within 30 years.   By the end of the 19th century it had increased to 220,000.  Large-scale building of low quality Victorian terraced housing did not stop overcrowding, which itself lead to chronic social deprivation.  The density of housing was as high as 80 homes per acre.

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