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Ely Cambridgeshire

Approximate Population: 15,102

Sir Clive Woodward, rugby union player and Rugby World Cup 2003 winning manager with England national rugby union team was born in Ely, as was Autogiro world record holder Ken Wallis and actor Simon MacCorkindale. Other notable people from Ely include The Sisters of Mercy singer Andrew Eldritch, and Australian émigrée actor Guy Pearce.   Folk singer Boo Hewerdine and crime writer Jim Kelly both currently live in Ely.

Former England football player Gary Lineker currently lives in Ely with Model girlfriend Danielle Buxton.   Noted press photographer Gareth Iwan Jones, lived in Ely between 1989-1999.   The creators of Lethal Cocktail, Alexander and James Andrews and Carl Skipper are also based within Ely.

In the spring of 2008 a competition was held to find an official anthem for the City of Ely.   The competition was sponsored by The Ely Standard, ADEC and Star 107 radio.   Judges from around the town and local music scene evaluated the entries and after much deliberation chose Ship of the Fens as the winner.   Written by local song writing duo Graham Brown and Geoff Meads, “Ship of the Fens” (a local nick-name for Ely Cathedral) describes life in Ely from the point of view of an elderly resident returning to the city.

Using a modern folk style in a homage to the popular Ely folk festival and recorded using all local musicians and singers, “Ship of the Fens” was first aired on Star 107s Mark Peters breakfast show on 19 June 2008 and performed live at the 2008 Ely Aquafest on 6 July 2008.

Local Plumbers Ely Cambridgeshire

Local Plumbers 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.

Local Plumbers Bath Somerset

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Derby East Midlands

Approximate Population: 233,700

Derby has Roman, Saxon and Viking connections.

The Roman camp of ‘Derventio’ was probably at Little Chester/Chester Green.  The site of the old Roman fort is at Chester Green.   Later the town was one of the ‘Five Boroughs’ (fortified towns) of the Danelaw.  The Tower of Derby Cathedral, England’s third tallest (Anglican) cathedral church tower.

The popular belief is that the name ‘Derby’ is a corruption of the Danish and Gaelic Djúra-bý (recorded in Anglo-Saxon as Deoraby) (Village of the Deer). However some assert that it is a corruption of the original Roman name ‘Derventio’.   The town was also named ‘Darby’ or ‘Darbye’ on some of the oldest maps, eg. Speed’s 1610 map.   Derby recently celebrated its 2,000th year as a settlement.

Modern research (2004) into the history and archaeology of Derby has provided evidence that the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons probably co-existed, occupying two areas of land surrounded by water.   The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (c. 900) says that “Derby is divided by water”.   These areas of land were known as Norþworþig (”Northworthy”, = “north enclosure”) and Deoraby, and were at the “Irongate” (North) side of Derby.

Local Plumbers Derby East Midlands

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Salisbury Wiltshire

Approximate Population: 45,000

The first Salisbury Cathedral was built at Old Sarum by St Bishop Osmund between 1075 and 1092.   A larger building was built on the same site circa 1120.   However, deteriorating relations between the clergy and the military at Old Sarum led to the decision to re-site the cathedral elsewhere.

Thus the city of New Sarum, known as Salisbury, was founded in 1220, and the building of the new cathedral begun by Bishop Richard Poore in that year. The main body was completed in only 38 years and is a masterpiece of Early English architecture.   Some stones which make up the cathedral came from Old Sarum, others from the Chilmark Quarries from where they were floated down the River Nadder in small boats.   The 123 m (400 ft) tall spire was built later and is the tallest spire in the UK.

The cathedral is built on a gravel bed with unusually shallow foundations of 18 inches (46 cm) upon wooden faggots: the site is supposed to have been selected by shooting an arrow from Old Sarum, although this can only be legend as the distance is over 3 kilometres (1.9 mi). It is sometimes claimed the arrow hit a white deer, which continued to run and died on the spot where the Cathedral now exists.

The cathedral library contains the best preserved of the four surviving copies of the Magna Carta.  In 1386, a large mechanical clock was installed at Salisbury Cathedral, the oldest surviving mechanical clock in Britain.

Local Plumbers Salisbury Wiltshire

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Manchester Greater Manchester

Approximate Population: 458,100

Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough of Greater Manchester, England. Manchester was granted city status in 1853.   In 2007, the population of the Manchester local government district was estimated to be 458,100, whilst the surrounding Metropolitan County of Greater Manchester had an estimated population of 2,562,200.

Manchester itself lies at the centre of the wider Greater Manchester Urban Area, which at the 2001 census was shown to have a population of 2,240,230 (of which 394,269 lived within the Manchester subdivision), and it was the United Kingdom’s third largest conurbation at that census.

Manchester has the second most populous Larger Urban Zone (LUZ) in the UK with an estimated population in the 2004 Urban Audit of 2,539,100 and is the fourteenth most populated in Europe.   Forming part of the English Core Cities Group, often described as the second city of the UK, and the “Capital of the North”, Manchester today is a centre of the arts, the media, higher education and commerce.   In a poll of British business leaders published in 2006, Manchester was regarded as the best place in the UK to locate a business.

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Manchester Greater Manchester

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Sheffield South Yorkshire

Approximate Population: 530,300

As World War II loomed the steel factories of Sheffield were set to work making weapons and ammunition for the war.   As a result, once war was declared, the city became a target for bombing raids, the heaviest of which occurred over the nights of 12 December and 15 December 1940 (now known as the Sheffield Blitz).  More than 660 lives were lost and numerous buildings were destroyed.

In the 1950s and 1960s, many of the slums were demolished and replaced with housing schemes such as the Park Hill flats.   Large parts of the city centre were also cleared to make way for a new system of roads.  Increased automation and competition from abroad resulted in the closure of many steel mills.   The 1980s saw the worst of this run-down of Sheffield’s industries (along with those of many other areas in the UK).   The 1984/5 miners’ strike affected the coal mining areas to the east and north east of Sheffield, though it is unlikely to have had a major impact upon Sheffield’s economy.   The building of the Meadowhall shopping centre on the site of a former steelworks in 1990 was a mixed blessing, creating much needed jobs but speeding the decline of the city centre.   Attempts to regenerate the city were kick-started when the city hosted the 1991 World Student Games, WSG, which saw the construction of new sporting facilities such as the Sheffield Arena, Don Valley Stadium and the Ponds Forge complex.

The city is now changing rapidly as new projects aim to regenerate some of the more run-down parts of the city. One such project, the Heart of the City Project, has seen a number of public works in the city centre: the Peace Gardens were renovated in 1998, the Millennium Galleries opened in April 2001, the Winter Gardens were opened on 22 May 2003, and a public space to link these two areas, the Millennium Square, was opened in May 2006. Further developments included the remodelling of Sheaf Square in front of the recently refurbished railway station. The new square contains The Cutting Edge a sculpture designed by Si Applied Ltd made of Sheffield steel.

Local Plumbers Sheffield South Yorkshire

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Blackburn Lancashire

Approximate Population: 105,085

Blackburn is a large town in Lancashire, England.   It lies to the north of the West Pennine Moors on the southern edge of the Ribble Valley, 8.9 miles (14.3 km) east of the city of Preston, and 21 miles (34 km) north-northwest of the city of Manchester. Blackburn is bounded to the south by Darwen, with which it forms the unitary authority area of Blackburn with Darwen, Blackburn being the administrative centre.   At the time of the UK Government’s 2001 census, Blackburn had a population of 105,085, whilst the wider borough had a population of 137,470.

A former mill town, textiles have been produced in Blackburn since the middle of the 13th century, when locally produced wool was woven in people’s houses. Flemish weavers who settled in the area during the 14th century helped to develop the industry.

James Hargreaves, inventor of the spinning jenny, was a weaver in Blackburn.  The most rapid period of growth and development in Blackburn’s history coincided with the industrialisation and expansion of textile manufacturing.   Blackburn was a boomtown of the Industrial Revolution, and amongst the first industrialised towns in the world.

Local Plumbers Blackburn Lancashire

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West Bromwich West Midlands

Approximate Population: 136,940

West Bromwich is famous for its football club, West Bromwich Albion.   The club was founded in 1878 and in 1888 it became one of the twelve founder members of the Football League.   It won the league championship in 1920 and has won the FA Cup five times, most recently in 1968.   The club recently won the Coca Cola Championship in 2008.   Albion were based in and around the centre of West Bromwich during their formative years, but moved further out of the town in 1900 when they switched to their current ground, The Hawthorns.

Engineering and chemicals are important to the town’s economy, as it played a crucial part in the Industrial Revolution during the 19th century and still retains many manufacturing jobs to this day, despite a steady nationwide decline in this sector since the 1970s.

Sandwell General Hospital is located near the town centre.   It is part of the Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, one of the largest NHS teaching trusts in the United Kingdom.  William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth had his seat at Sandwell Hall.   Legge was unusual as an aristocrat of this period by being a Methodist and attending the Wednesbury Methodist meetings, where fellow Methodists - many of them colliers and drovers - knew him as “Brother Earl”.

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West Bromwich West Midlands