Wellingborough
Wellingborough is a market town in the North Northamptonshire, Unitary Authority area, England, from London and from Northampton, north of the River Nene.
Originally named "Wendelingburgh", the Anglo-Saxon settlement is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as "Wendelburie". The town's market was granted a royal charter in 1201 by King John. At the 2021 census, it had a population of 56,564. The built-up area also includes suburbs Wilby, Great Doddington, Little Irchester, Redhill Grange, Stanton Cross, Waendel View and Glenvale Park.
History
The town was established in the Anglo-Saxon period and was called "Wendelingburgh", deriving from the Old English waendelburh or waendelingburh meaning 'Waendel's burh'. It is surrounded by five wells: Redwell, Hemmingwell, Witche's Well, Lady's Well and Whytewell, which appear on its coat of arms. Henrietta Maria, the Queen Consort of King Charles I, came with her physician Théodore de Mayerne to take the waters on 14 July 1627.The medieval town of Wellingborough housed a modest monastic grange – now the Jacobean Croyland Abbey – which was an offshoot of the monastery of Crowland Abbey, near Peterborough, some down-river. This part of the town is known as Croyland.
All Hallows Church is the oldest existing building in Wellingborough and dates from c. 1160. The manor of Wellingborough belonged to Crowland Abbey Lincolnshire, from Saxon times and the monks probably built the original church. The earliest part of the building is the Norman doorway opening in from the later south porch. The church was enlarged with the addition of more side chapels and by the end of the 13th century had assumed more or less its present plan. The west tower, crowned with a graceful broach spire rising to, was completed about 1270, after which the chancel was rebuilt and given the east window twenty years later. The church was restored in 1861 by Edmund Francis Law. The 20th-century Church of St Mary was built by Ninian Comper.
Wellingborough was given a Market Charter dated 3 April 1201 when King John granted it to the "Abbot of Croyland and the monks serving God there" continuing, "they shall have a market at Wendligburg for one day each week that is Wednesday".
In the Elizabethan era the Lord of the Manor, Sir Christopher Hatton was a sponsor of Sir Francis Drake's expeditions; Drake renamed one of his ships the Golden Hind after the heraldic symbol of the Hatton family. A hotel in a Grade II listed building built in the 17th century, was known variously as the Hind Hotel and later as the Golden Hind Hotel.
During the English Civil War the largest substantial conflict in the area was the Battle of Naseby in 1645, although a minor skirmish in the town resulted in the killing of a parliamentarian officer Captain John Sawyer. Severe reprisals followed which included the carrying off to Northampton of the parish priest, Thomas Jones, and 40 prisoners by a group of Roundheads. However, after the Civil War Wellingborough was home to a colony of Diggers. Little is known about this period.
Wellingborough was bombed during World War II, on Monday 3 August 1942. Six people were killed and 55 injured; fortunately, being a bank holiday, thousands of people were away at a fair at a nearby village. Many houses and other buildings in the centre of the town were damaged in the attack.
Originally the town had two railway stations: the first called, opened in 1845 and closed in 1966, linked Peterborough with Northampton. The second station, Wellingborough Midland Road, is still in operation with trains to London and the East Midlands. Since then the 'Midland Road' was dropped from the station name. The Midland Road station opened in 1857 with trains serving Kettering and a little later Corby, was linked in 1867 to London St Pancras. In 1898 in the Wellingborough rail accident six or seven people died and around 65 were injured. In the 1880s two businessmen held a public meeting to build three tram lines in Wellingborough, the group merged with a similar company in Newport Pagnell who started to lay tram tracks, but within two years the plans were abandoned due to lack of funds.
Governance
Wellingborough is part of the unitary authority of North Northamptonshire. Until 2021 it was seat of Borough Council of Wellingborough The borough council covered 20 settlements including the town together with Bozeat, Earls Barton, Easton Maudit, Ecton, Finedon, Great Doddington, Great Harrowden, Grendon, Hardwick, Irchester, Isham, Little Harrowden, Little Irchester, Mears Ashby, Orlingbury, Strixton, Sywell, Wilby, and Wollaston.In April 2021 the Borough of Wellingborough was abolished and replaced by a new unitary authority called North Northamptonshire, which covers the areas of the districts of Wellingborough, Corby, East Northamptonshire and Kettering. Elections for the new authorities were due to be held on 7 May 2020, but were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Concurrent with these changes, the unparished area of Wellingborough was established as a civil parish and gained a new Town Council, eliminating the need for charter trustees. Wellingborough has a mayor.
Wellingborough is part of the Wellingborough Constituency which includes the town, surrounding villages and other urban areas. The current MP is Gen Kitchen. Most wards in the Borough Council of Wellingborough are covered by the constituency and also include the wards in the East Northamptonshire district, the wards are: Bozeat, Brickhill, Croyland, Finedon, Great Doddington and Wilby, Harrowden & Sywell, Hatton, Higham Ferrers Lancaster, Higham Ferrers Chichele, Irchester, Isebrook, Queensway, Redwell, Rixon, Rushden Hayden, Rushden Spencer, Rushden Bates, Rushden Sartoris, Rushden Pemberton, Swanspool, Victoria, and Wollaston. Wellingborough is currently represented in the House of Commons by Gen Kitchen. In the 1918 general election it became the first constituency in southern England outside London to be represented by the Labour Party.
Prior to Brexit in 2020, Wellingborough was represented by the East Midlands constituency in the European Parliament.
Geography
Geology
The town is sited on the hills adjoining the flood plain of the River Nene. In the predominantly agrarian Middle Ages, this combination of access to fertile, if flood-prone, valley bottom soils and drier hillside/ hilltop soils seems to have been good for a mixed agricultural base. The clay-rich hilltop soils are primarily a consequence of blanketing of the area with boulder clay or glacial till during the recent glaciations. On the valley sides and valley floor however, these deposits have been largely washed away in the late glacial period, and in the valley bottom extensive deposits of gravels were laid down, which have largely been exploited for building aggregate in the last century.Iron ore
The most economically important aspect of the geology of the area is the Northampton Sands ironstone formation. This is a marine sand of Jurassic age, deposited as part of an estuary sequence and overlain by a sequence of limestones and mudrocks. Significant amounts of the sand have been replaced or displaced by iron minerals, giving an average ore grade of around 25 wt% iron. To the west the iron ores have been moderately exploited for a very long time, but their high phosphorus content made them difficult to smelt and produced iron of poor quality until the development of the Bessemer steel-making process and the "basic slag" smelting chemistry, which combine to make high-quality steelmaking possible from these unprepossessing ores. The Northampton Sands were a strategic resource for the United Kingdom in the run-up to World War II, being the best-developed bulk iron-producing processes wholly free from dependence on imported materials. However, because the Northampton Sands share in the regional dip of all the sediments of this part of Britain to the east-south-east, they become increasingly difficult to work as one progresses east across the county.Iron ore quarrying was a major industry in and around Wellingborough from the 1860s until the 1960s. James Rixon and Wiliam Ashwell opened a major ironworks on the north side of the town in 1870, supplied by the extensive ironstone quarries around Finedon to the east of the town. Three narrow gauge tramways served the iron ore industry, the Wellingborough Tramway, Neilson's Tramway and the Finedonhill Tramway. The Wellingborough Tramway served Rixon's ironworks until 1966.
Hydrography
Wellingborough has the river Ise to the east, across which are Irthlingborough and Finedon, and the river Nene to the south, across which is Irchester.The Nene formed parts of the boundaries of the historical hundred of Hamferdsho, to which Wellingborough once belonged, and was made navigable past Wellingborough in the middle 18th century.
A new channel for it was constructed in the meadows below Wellingborough bridge in 1832.
Swanspool Brook, known in the 19th century as Swans'-pool, runs through the town past the southern end of Sheep Street, and around the erstwhile grounds of Croyland Abbey.
A bridge over it was built in 1798, replacing a prior smaller bridge, and in the 19th century an embankment ran for roughly alongside the stream from Croyland.