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 | Northampton Downtown car rental - Travel Guide |  |
Spreading north from the banks of the River Nene, NORTHAMPTON is a workaday modern town whose appearance largely belies its ancient past. Throughout the Middle Ages, this was one of central England's most important towns, a flourishing commercial centre whose now demolished castle was a popular stopping-off point for travelling royalty. A fire in 1675 burnt most of the medieval city to a cinder and the Georgian town that grew up in its stead was itself swamped by the industrial revolution when Northampton swarmed with boot and shoemakers. Their products shod almost everyone in the Empire - from Australia to Canada - as well as the British army.
Northampton's compact centre is at its most appealing on and around its main plaza, Market Square, which is where you'll find the town's finest buildings, notably All Saints' Church and the Guildhall. Half a day is enough for a quick gambol round the sights, but if you're tempted to stay the night there's a reasonable supply of hotel accommodation and a scattering of B&Bs.
The Town
Northampton's expansive, cobbled Market Square has a busy, self-confident air, its sides flanked by a comparatively harmonious mixture of the old and the new. From here, either of a couple of narrow lanes leads through to the church of All Saints (Mon-Sat 9am-2pm; free), whose unusually secular appearance stems from its finely proportioned, pillared portico as well as its towered cupola. A statue of Charles II in Roman attire surmounts the portico, a (flattering) thank you for his donation of a thousand tons of timber after the Great Fire of 1675 had incinerated the earlier church. Inside, the elegant interior looks more like a ballroom than a church, from the sweep of its timber galleries through to its Neoclassical pillars and a ceiling coated in delicately sculpted plasterwork.
Behind the church is St Giles Square, where the Guildhall is a flamboyant Victorian edifice constructed in the 1860s to a design by Edward Godwin. Godwin was one of the period's most inventive architects and his Gothic exterior, with its high-pointed windows and dinky turrets and towers, sports kings and queens plus scenes central to the county's history.
The Central Museum and Art Gallery (Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 2-5pm; free), a few yards south on Guildhall Road, celebrates the town's industrial heritage with a surprisingly interesting display of shoes. Along with silk slippers, clogs and high-heeled nineteenth-century court shoes, there's one of the four boots worn by an elephant during the British Expedition of 1959, which retraced Hannibal's putative route over the Alps into Italy. There's celebrity footwear, too - almost inevitably, a pair of Elton John shoes (the giant DMs he wore in Tommy ) - plus whole cabinets of heavy-duty riding boots, pearl-inlaid raised wooden sandals from Ottoman Turkey and a couple of cabinets showing just how long high heels have been in fashion. Much of the rest of the museum is given over to an excellent display charting the town's history from its Roman days to the present, paying particular attention to the significance of the shoe industry, which employed no less than half the town's population in 1920. |
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