
I was born and raised in Northampton, a small town in the English East Midlands. Plain knowledge about the town, its history and current condition, can easily be found on the internet. There is a good Wikipedia entry here. The town has its own official website here. The town newspaper, the Chronicle & Echo has a website here, giving a good view of the town's present concerns.
Northampton is the county seat of Northamptonshire. In the traditional mental maps of the English, England is divided into The South, The Midlands, and The North, with The West (south and west of the Bristol Channel) and East Anglia (Norfolk and Suffolk) added as afterthoughts. In this schema, Northamptonshire is counted as being in the East Midlands.
In these pages I have just written out my family's relation to Northampton, including a good deal of random reminiscence about my own childhood there.
The Northampton I am describing is the one my parents moved to in 1943, and the one I grew up in 1945-63. For these purposes I have made use of some old maps. The maps are described, and can be viewed entire, in links from the "Town" web page.
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The downward links give details on:
- How my family came to Northampton.
- The town itself, with downward links to those maps.
- 62 Friars Avenue, the house where I did most of my growing up (ages 3 to 18).
- Delapre Estate, my neighborhood.
- Far Cotton, where I first went to school.
- Some notes on Queen Eleanor's Cross, a local antiquity.
- Hardingstone village.