I live in a village just outside place called Kettering, which is a rather small town situated in the centre of England, where generally not that much happens. One of the only notable things I can think about Kettering is its history of boot and shoe production. After Britain's industrialisation Kettering and indeed much of the county of Northamptonshire pretty much became the shoe capital of the world. The First World War called for a huge rise in the production of boots worldwide, many of which were produced in my area. To give you an idea of the scale of this, when war was declared in August 1914, the War Office in London placed an order for 500,00 boots from Kettering factories and the French army 250,000. By the end of 1914 over 1 million boots had been produced in Kettering alone (the whole area was known as the shoe belt, so more production would have been going on in factories in other local towns). In 1916 the Russian army ordered 6 milion boots from Kettering. There was also a bit of a scandal involving all this manic shoe production. I guess with all the tremendous demand, quality control wasn't quite up to scratch and during the winter of 1914 the British army complained that many of the boots were falling apart. There's still a few remnants of the shoe industry left here these days, particularly the famous company Cheaneys who still produce here. So yeah, shoes.
During the Second World War, Harrington Airfield (which is about 2 minutes away from my house), was used primarily for launching secret missions into occupied France, most notably Operation Carpetbagger. During the Cold War, the U.S Army kept a whole bunch of Thor Ballistic missiles there. None where ever deployed, but I believe it the very fact that they were stored at Harrington has only come to light in the last 10 or 15 years.
Going back a bit, Francis Tresham who would become one of the conspirators involved in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, grew up around here and even built a few buildings (most notably Triangular Lodge, legend of which says Tresham had built an underground passage to London leading from it's basement). These days there are a bunch of local institutions named after him, such as Tresham College.
Also, the awesome band Bauhaus came from Northampton, and Spacemen 3/Spiritualized from Rugby, which isn't far away at all. The nearby town of Corby is often voted worst or second worst town in Britain.
Finally, in my village there's a guy who keeps llamas. That's cool, right?
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Cool stuff about the place you live.