Northamptonshire

Abstract

The rural landscape of the county of Northamptonshire with its wide farmlands, low hedges, wooded valleys and many church spires could be said to characterise the essentially English countryside. In contrast is the industrial side of the picture, the ironstone quarrying and steelworks of Corby and the boot and shoe and engineering industries of Northampton and nearby towns. Almost at the centre of England and reaching from its Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire borders in the south-west to the lower tip of Lincolnshire in the north-east, Northamptonshire’s borders, unlike those of its seven neighbouring ‘shires’, remained unchanged by the local government reorganisations of 1974.