title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: In the same year, Buakaw was signed as a sponsored fighter by Yokkao founder, Phillip Villa. He led the Muay Thai Combat Fan Expo to showcase the sport in Rimini, Italy with Saenchai, Sudsakorn Sor Klinmee, Dzhabar Askerov and many others.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: On January 21, 2012, Buakaw headlined "Yokkao Extreme 2012" in Milan Italy in front of 12,000 attendees. He defeated Dzhabar Askerov by points in the main event.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: On March 1, 2012, he was notably absent from his training camp. On March 12, he appeared on a Thai TV talk show to apologize to the fans and explain his disappearance, stating that he had recurring problems in Por. Pramuk Gym since 2009 and felt insulted by the behavior of the management there. He had been scheduled to visit Japan with the Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra for an exhibition match but it was canceled in favor of another fight. As a result of the complication, he decided to part ways with the gym. He said "I can stand tough training, but not poor treatment. It is about the mind, not the body."


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: On March 17, 2012, Buakaw's sponsor Yokkao Boxing announced that he would return to training. It was at this time that they began referring to him as Buakaw Banchamek. He had resumed training at the "newly-built" Banchamek gym (named after him), as of March 22, 2012. He was scheduled to fight Mickael Cornubet at ThaiFight on April 17, 2012.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: On March 30, 2012, Buakaw was prevented from fighting at Thai Fight in April 2012, until he filed a complaint with the Sports Authority of Thailand proving his claims of unfair treatment by Por. Pramuk. On April 4, he said that his fight name for the fight later that month would be "Buakaw", and that he "may not use the name of the boxing camp Por. Pramuk."


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: Buakaw's first fight after leaving Por Pramuk Gym was a success. He knocked out Rustem Zaripov at 2:45 of the 2nd round with accurate punches. On May 31, 2012, Buakaw told the press that he wanted to end the dispute between him and Por. Pramuk Gym. For a time, Buakaw was seen in jiujitsu, judo, and wrestling classes. An MMA career would have allowed Buakaw to fight without breaching his contract with the Por. Pramuk boxing camp. Nevertheless, Buakaw returned to the ring on August 17, 2012, when he defeated Abdoul Toure by way of TKO in round 2.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: Buakaw beat Mauro Serra via TKO in the quarter-finals of the 2012 Thai Fight 70 kg Tournament at "Thai Fight 2012: King of Muay Thai" in Bangkok, Thailand, on October 23, 2012. He then defeated Tomoyuki Nishikawa by unanimous decision in the tournament semi-finals in Nakhon Ratchasima on November 25, 2012. He fought Vitaly Gurkov in the final on December 16, 2012, and won the Thai Fight tournament via decision.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: On March 27, 2013, Buakaw faced his friend and teammate Harlee Avison in a staged exhibition match, which was free to the public, at the brand new Beeline Arena in Cambodia. On May 6, 2013, Buakaw again went off script to KO Malik Watson in round two in an exhibition match at "MAX Muay Thai 1" in Surin, Thailand.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: Buakaw made his return to legitimate fighting with a decision win over Dong Wen Fei in a three-round kickboxing match at "MAX Muay Thai 3" in China on August 10, 2013. He re-signed with K-1 in August 2013 and returned with a first round body shot KO of David Calvo at the K-1 World MAX 2013 World Championship Tournament Final 16 in Mallorca, Spain on September 14, 2013. In their fourth meeting, Buakaw bested Yoshihiro Sato on points at MAX Muay Thai 4 in Sendai, Japan on October 6, 2013. He beat Enriko Kehl by decision at MAX Muay Thai 5: The Final Chapter in Khon Kaen, Thailand on December 10, 2013.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: Buakaw defeated Zhou Zhi Peng on points after an extension round at the K-1 World MAX 2013 World Championship Tournament Quarter Finals - Part 1 in Foshan, China on December 28, 2013. Zhou attempted to turn the fight into a brawl, and despite Buakaw doing enough to win the decision, the judges sent it to an extra round in which Buakaw suffered a cut from a head butt. In spite of this, Buakaw was able to establish dominance to take the fight and advance in the tournament. At the K-1 World MAX 2013 World Championship Tournament Final 4 in Baku, Azerbaijan, on February 23, 2014, he beat Lee Sung-Hyun by unanimous decision in the semi-finals.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: Buakaw beat Victor Nagbe via unanimous decision at "Combat Banchamek" in Surin, Thailand, on April 14, 2014. He knocked out Adaylton Parreira De Freitas in round two at Muay Thai in Macau on June 6, 2014. Buakaw was scheduled to fight Fabio Pinca for the vacant WMC World Junior Middleweight (-69.9 kg/154 lb) Championship at Monte Carlo Fighting Masters 2014 in Monte Carlo, Monaco, on June 14, 2014. However, Pinca was injured in a bout with Thongchai Sitsongpeenong in February and was replaced by Djime Coulibaly. Buakaw defeated Coulibaly via unanimous decision to take the belt.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: Buakaw was initially set to rematch Enriko Kehl in the K-1 World MAX 2013 World Championship Tournament Final in Pattaya, Thailand, on 26 July 2014. However, the event was postponed due to the 2014 Thai coup d'état. On 12 October 2014 he lost to Kehl by forfeit in the K-1 World Max Final event in Pattaya.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: Buakaw lost the "TopKing World Series Semifinal Tournament (TK4)" against Russian fighter Khayal Dzhaniev in a controversial decision. Many Muay Thai journalists have stated that Buakaw should have won the match. Buakaw also suffered from deep cuts in his head inflicted by Khayal's elbows while Khayal suffered broken ribs. Khayal was later hospitalized upon being forced to forfeit the final match that same night.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: Buakaw fought Chinese fighter Kong Lingfeng in the main event at "Kunlun Fight 62" on June 10, 2017, in Bangkok, Thailand. He won the fight by decision.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: Buakaw was expected to headline the debut of Kunlun Fight in France on November 11 in Paris. The event didn't happen and Buakaw fought in China at "Kunlun Fight 67" where he knocked out Dutch Maroun Toutouh in the second round with punches.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: Buakaw defeated French Azize Hlali by knockout in the first round in the headline bout at "All Star Fight" on August 20, 2017 in Bangkok, Thailand.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: On September 30 Buakaw scored the decision against Sergey Kuliaba of Ukraine at "All Star Fight 2" in Bangkok


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: On December 10 Buakaw was expected to fight Fabio Pinca at "All Star Fight 3" held in Paris, but the Frenchman pulled out after suffering the knockout defeat against Uzbekistan's Anvar Boynazarov at Glory 47 Lyon on October 28, 2017.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: Buakaw faced Nayanesh Ayman in China at "Kunlun Fight 69" on February 4, 2018, where he won via first-round knockout.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: Buakaw is expected to challenge Spanish Jonay Risco for 70 kg title on March 9, 2018 at Enfusion kickboxing promotion in Abu Dhabi.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: Buakaw fought Portuguese Luis Passos on 28 of April 2018 on "All Star Fight 3" in Bangkok Thailand where he won via unanimous decision.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: He fought three more times in 2018 on All Star Fight events held in Hong Kong, Prague and Pattaya respectively. He won on all three occasions by points.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: Buakaw headlined "All Star Fight: World Soldier" on March 9, 2019 in Bangkok Thailand. The show was organized in partnership with the Royal Thai Army to promote the national sport of Muay Thai as well as the fighters, several of whom are soldiers including Buakaw. He fought against Russian kickboxer, Artem Pashporin and won by unanimous decision.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: Buakaw was scheduled to face Chris Ngimbi at "MAS Fight Kun Khmer" under MAS Fight rules (1 round of 9 minutes) on October 27, 2019 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He defeated Ngimbi by technical knockout at 4:10 of the fight.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: After a nearly three-year-long hiatus, Buakaw made his return to competition against Dmitry Varats at "World Fight Tournament" in Phnom Penh, Cambodia on July 6, 2022. He won the fight via unanimous decision.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: On July 13th 2022 it was announced by David Feldman, President and Founder of Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship, that Buakaw had signed a deal to fight for BKFC. He made his debut headlining on September 3, 2022, where he defeated Erkan Varol by first-round knockout.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: On October 26, 2022, it was announced that Buakaw is scheduled to face Muay Thai legend Saenchai in a bare-knuckle Muay Thai bout on March 2023 at a BKFC event.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: Buakaw enrolled in Rattana Bundit University's business administration, he graduated in 2016 . In February 2014, he signed for RBAC F.C., the association football club representing Rattana Bundit University, which plays in the Regional League Division 2 and is the reserve team of BEC Tero Sasana F.C., who plays in the Thai Premier League. Buakaw is a graduate of Rattana Bundit University (RBAC). Playing as a forward, he made his debut on February 16.


title: Buakaw Banchamek

text: He has a village project in the Chiang Mai Province of Thailand called Buakaw Village, it contains a muay thai gym, a restaurant, and bungalows that can be rented by people who come to train at the muay thai gym.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton () is a market town and civil parish in the East Midlands of England, on the River Nene, north-west of London and south-east of Birmingham. The county town of Northamptonshire, Northampton is one of the largest towns in England; it had a population of 212,100 in its previous local authority in the 2011 census (225,100 as of 2018 estimates). In its urban area, which includes Boughton and Moulton, it had a population of 215,963 as of 2011.


title: Northampton

text: Archaeological evidence of settlement in the area dates to the Bronze Age, Romans and Anglo-Saxons. In the Middle Ages, the town rose to national significance with the establishment of Northampton Castle, an occasional royal residence which regularly hosted the Parliament of England. Medieval Northampton had many churches, monasteries and the University of Northampton, all enclosed by the town walls. It was granted a town charter by Richard I in 1189 and a mayor was appointed by King John in 1215. The town was also the site of two medieval battles, in 1264 and 1460.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton supported the Parliamentary Roundheads in the English Civil War, and Charles II ordered the destruction of the town walls and most of the castle. The Great Fire of Northampton in 1675 destroyed much of the town. It was soon rebuilt and grew rapidly with the industrial development of the 18th century. Northampton continued to grow with the arrival of the Grand Union Canal and the railways in the 19th century, becoming a centre for footwear and leather manufacture.


title: Northampton

text: Growth was limited following the World Wars until it was designated a New Town in 1968, accelerating development which has continued into the 21st century. Northampton has unsuccessfully applied for city status three times; in 2000, 2002 and 2022.


title: Northampton

text: The earliest reference to Northampton in writing occurred in 914 under the name "Ham tune", literally meaning "home town". The prefix "North" was added later to distinguish it from other towns called Hampton, most prominently Southampton. The "Domesday Book" (1086) records the town as "Northantone", which evolved into "Norhamptone" by the 13th century and later "Northampton" by the 17th century.


title: Northampton

text: Present-day Northampton is the latest in a series of settlements that began in the Bronze Age. Remains found in the Briar Hill district show evidence of a Neolithic encampment within a large circular earthwork where local farmers assembled for tribal ceremonies and seasonal events from approximately 3500 BC to 2000 BC.


title: Northampton

text: During the British Iron Age, people typically lived in protected hill forts. Present-day Hunsbury Hill is an example of this settlement; a circular ditch and a bank faced with a wall of timber and enclosing an area of which dates to around 400 BC. In the Roman period, a small rural settlement is thought to have existed in the present-day district of Duston; remains of Roman pottery were found there.


title: Northampton

text: Following a Danish invasion, the central area of the town was turned into a stronghold called a "burh" probably by the Anglo-Saxons. By the time of the Peace of Wedmore in 878 the Burgh was in possession of the Danes and became the base for one of the Danish armies. A ditch was dug around the settlement and it was fortified with earth ramparts. Having conquered Mercia, the Danes turned the settlement into a centre for military and administrative purposes, which was part of the Danelaw. The Danish army of Northampton however submitted to Edward the Elder, Saxon King of Wessex (who controlled the southern and western part of the English Kingdom of Mercia) in 921


title: Northampton

text: In the 9th century "Regenhere of Northampton" an East Anglian Saint with localised veneration was buried in Northampton. By 918, Northampton had an earl and an army dependent upon it, whose territory extended to the River Welland.


title: Northampton

text: Edward the Elder turned Northampton into the centre of one of the new shires, and it prospered as a river port and trading centre. In 940, it resisted the invading forces of Danish opposition in Northumbria when the Mercians successfully defended the town in a siege by King Olaf of York, but was burnt in 1010 by a Danish army, and again in 1065 by the rebellious northern earls Edwin and Morcar. Despite this, the "Domesday Book" records "Northantone" as possessing 316 houses with a population of 2000 people, ranking between Warwick and Leicester in size.


title: Northampton

text: With the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the town rose to national significance: its geographical location in the centre of England made Northampton a valuable strategical point for government and as a convenient meeting place for political, social, ecclesiastical and military events.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton Castle is thought to have been built by Simon de Senlis, who became the first Earl of Northampton, circa 1084. It was originally an earth and timber stockaded construction which was later rebuilt in stone. The castle became an occasional royal residence from the reign of King Henry I in 1130 until that of King Richard II. King John regularly stayed at the castle and moved The Treasury there in 1205. Some 32 Parliaments were held there. The last Parliament at Northampton was held in 1380. Significant events in the castle's history include the trial of Thomas Becket in 1164, the publication of the Assize of Northampton in 1176, the declaration of peace with Scotland in the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton, the passage of the Statute of Northampton in 1328 and the imposition of poll tax in 1380. Royal tournaments and feasts were also held at the castle.


title: Northampton

text: Simon de Senlis is also thought to have built the medieval town walls, which enclosed about and had four main gates. Though demolished now, the circular pattern of the main roads surrounding the town centre marks the original position of the walls. de Senlis founded the Cluniac Priory of St Andrew's in the area of Semilong, and built The Church of the Holy Sepulchre – one of four remaining round churches in England – and All Hallows' Church on the current site of All Saints' Church. His son, Simon II de Senlis, built St Peter's Church on a site between a former Anglo-Saxon palace and Northampton Castle. Simon II de Senlis also founded Delapré Abbey – another Cluniac priory – which still stands today. Other priories in medieval Northampton include St James' Abbey, Graye Friers, Blackfriars and Whitefriars. St. John's, a medieval hospital, was situated east of Bridge Street. A network of medieval tunnels remains under the centre of Northampton around All Saints' Church and the Market Square but their purpose, extent and significance have been disputed.


title: Northampton

text: The town was originally controlled by officials acting for the King who collected taxes and upheld the law. This changed on 18 November 1189 when King Richard I granted the town its first charter in exchange for money to fund his crusades. The charter allowed the townspeople certain rights and independence in legal and administrative matters. In 1215, King John authorised the appointment of William Tilly as the town's first Mayor and ordered that "twelve of the better and more discreet [residents] of your town" join him as a council to assist him. The importance of Northampton at this time is underlined by the fact that only London, York and King's Lynn had mayors by this date. The mayor later ruled with 24 councillors and 48 freemen in a closed body until 1835.


title: Northampton

text: In 1261, the medieval University of Northampton was established by royal charter from King Henry III. Had it survived, it would be the third oldest university founded in England after Oxford and Cambridge. However, after members of the university sided with supporters of Simon de Montfort (who was rebelling against the King) and advisors to The Crown said that Northampton was a threat to Oxford's scholastic hegemony, Henry III dissolved the university in 1265.


title: Northampton

text: Markets and fairs were a key element in the town's economy in medieval times. The Market Square came to prominence in 1235 when Henry III ordered that the selling of goods in the churchyard of All Saints should be relocated to the Market Square. Street names in the town give an indication of trades and market centres; Corn Hill, Malt Hill, Mercer Row, Gold Street, Sheep Street and Horse Market. Cloth and wool were very important but these industries declined. In the 13th century, Northampton had a large Jewish population centred on Gold Street. In 1277 – two years after Edward I passed the Statute of the Jewry – some Jewish residents were executed while the remainder were driven out of town. Archaeological sites include a medieval Jewish cemetery and the Northampton Medieval Synagogue.


title: Northampton

text: The First Barons' War caused significant destruction to Northampton. The barons besieged Northampton Castle in protest at King John's oppression of his subjects. In retaliation, royalist forces destroyed a large part of the town. When the forces of King Henry III overran the supporters of Simon de Montfort, the Second Barons' War broke out. The First Battle of Northampton took place in 1264 at the site of Northampton Castle where King Henry III and his son Prince Edward attacked with a large army, pillaged the town and took prisoners.


title: Northampton

text: In 1349, the Black Death pandemic killed more than half the population of Northampton. In 1377, the population was 2,200. The town was rapidly losing its wealth and its importance as a national centre. In 1460, the Second Battle of Northampton took place during the War of the Roses in the meadows between the River Nene and Delapré Abbey. The Yorkists defeated the Lancastrians and King Henry VI was taken prisoner. In 1484, the Mayor declared that Northampton was "in great desolation and ruin". The Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1538 led to further destruction of what remained of the medieval town. Northampton was severely affected by Plague between March and September 1638 when 665 people died.


title: Northampton

text: The royal connection to Northampton Castle became less significant, and by the time of the English Civil War, Northampton was decidedly pro-Parliament. Though Spencer Compton, Earl of Northampton, was a royalist (Cavalier) and backed King Charles I, the people of Northampton supported Parliament and Oliver Cromwell's republican Roundhead army. The town had a long history of religious dissent from the Lollards and Puritanism gained a strong hold on the town. The corporation of the town, having already refused to provide troops to the King in 1632 or to pay the notorious ship money tax in 1636, petitioned Parliament in 1642 against papists and bishops.


title: Northampton

text: When war broke out in 1642, the town willingly became the main Parliamentarian garrison for the south-east Midlands area with the former royal castle as its headquarters. In 1643, Prince Rupert attacked Northampton with approximately 2,000 men, but was beaten back at the North Gate of the town. Oliver Cromwell visited in 1645 and General Fairfax marched from the town to Naseby, where Charles I's Royalist army was decisively defeated. Over 4,000 pairs of leather shoes and 600 pairs of cavalry jack-boots for the Parliamentary armies were manufactured in Northampton during the Civil War, and a further 2,000 for Cromwell's New Model Army in 1648. Until well into the 19th century, the shoe industry boomed in and around the town with small manufacturing workshops set up in the surrounding areas.


title: Northampton

text: The War ended with a Parliamentary victory, resulting in England becoming a Commonwealth, which lasted a decade. Following the restoration of King Charles II in 1660, he took revenge on the town by ordering the destruction of its walls and partial demolition of its castle in 1662, since it did not support his father Charles I and his cavaliers. From then on, the castle was used as a court and a gaol, but its physical condition worsened. The new council of the town had to pay £200 to have its charter renewed and also required all officials to swear the oath of allegiance and some confirmed by the Crown.


title: Northampton

text: The town centre was further destroyed by the Great Fire of Northampton in 1675, caused by sparks from an open fire in a thatched cottage by the castle. The fire spread eastwards by strong westerly winds and consumed three-quarters of the town centre in 24 hours. Matters were worsened because most buildings were chiefly made of wood and covered with thatch. An estimated 600 buildings were destroyed, amounting to £150,000 lost. Very little survived the fire, apart from buildings made of stone, like the Welsh House on Market Square, built in 1595, and Hazelrigg House in Mare Fair, built in 1662.


title: Northampton

text: The devastation led to an Act of Parliament for the rebuilding the town. Local people and businesses helped to raise around £25,000 towards the rebuilding of the town centre based around the Market Square. Streets were widened and buildings made of brick and stone and tiled to prevent such devastation again. In an act of reconciliation, King Charles II donated timber from the royal forests of Salcey and Whittlebury to help with the rebuild. In 1678, the Sessions House and what is now County Hall were amongst the first buildings to be completed. A Georgian town with new houses, shops and workshops eventually grew out of the old medieval town destroyed by the fire. In 1742 Edward Cave opened Marvel's Mill, the world's first cotton mill to be driven by a water wheel, on the River Nene.


title: Northampton

text: A permanent military presence was established in the town with the completion of Gibraltar Barracks in 1797.


title: Northampton

text: By the end of the 18th century, Northampton had become a major centre of footwear and leather manufacture. In 1801, the population was 7,020; it more than doubled to 15,351 in 1831, attributed to the fact that there was great demand for footwear caused by the Napoleonic Wars of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A third of the adult males alone were shoemakers at the time. Northampton grew beyond the old town walls and industry grew rapidly with the mechanisation of factories by the middle of the 19th century.


title: Northampton

text: The Nene Navigation Company had previously made the River Nene navigable from King's Lynn as far up as Northampton in 1762, allowing cheap transportation of coal and other goods to the town, but in 1815, the Grand Union Canal reached the town, joining the River Nene, giving the town a direct link to the Midlands coalfields and to Birmingham, Manchester and London.


title: Northampton

text: The first railway to be built into Northampton was the Northampton and Peterborough Railway, a branch from the main London and Birmingham Railway from Blisworth to Peterborough through Northampton which opened in 1845 along with the town's first railway station, Bridge Street station. This was followed by the opening of Castle station in 1859 on the site of part of the historic Northampton Castle, and later St. John's Street station in 1872. The Northampton loop of the West Coast Main Line was built in the late 1870s. Castle station was rebuilt and expanded over the site of Northampton Castle, the remains of which were purchased and demolished in 1880 to make way for the goods shed. Bridge Street Station closed in 1964 and St John's Street closed in 1939, leaving only Castle station serving the town. It is now known simply as Northampton railway station.


title: Northampton

text: Tram lines were also laid down in the town in 1881 and electrified in 1903. An early omnibus service ran to Wellingborough, and since 1919 motor omnibus services ran to villages around the town which brought buyers and sellers to the market.


title: Northampton

text: There were iron ore quarries in the countryside around the town during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which have left their mark on the landscape. Some of the quarries were in what is now the town area in an arc from Kingsthorpe through Duston and Hunsbury round to Hardingstone beginning in about 1860. Some have now been built over and not all lasted very long. The town area quarries that lasted the longest and closed last were at Hunsbury which began working in 1877 and closed in 1920. There are remains of some of these quarries at Hunsbury Hill. There was an iron works by the river to the west of the town next to the railway that then operated between Northampton and Blisworth. This was called the Hunsbury Ironworks and operated between about 1874 and January 1921 using ore from these quarries and elsewhere.


title: Northampton

text: Following World War I, the shoe industry was increasingly in decline, despite the town's factories supplying over 23 million pairs of boots to the armed forces. A total of 1,700 men from the town were lost of the 6,000 killed from the Northamptonshire Regiment. The town expanded further during the 1920s and saw the erection of Northampton Power Station, which supplied electricity to areas as far away as Wolverton, until its closure in 1975. Much council housing was also built largely to the east, north and south of the town, including Abington, Far Cotton, Kingsley, Kingsthorpe and Dallington – areas which had been incorporated within the borough's boundaries in 1901. However, the population growth slowed down as people moved beyond its boundaries. In 1901, the population had expanded to 90,923; in 1931, the population was 92,341.


title: Northampton

text: After World War II, Northampton vastly changed. In 1959, the M1 motorway was opened to the south-west of the town; in 1968, Northampton was designated a New Town. Both these events and the rail link helped Northampton's growth as a commuter town for London. The Northampton Development Corporation (NDC) was set up in 1968 to substantially redevelop the town in partnership with the local council, spending £205 million to build new housing and industrial estates, initially in Lumbertubs, Moulton Park and Round Spinney to the east, followed by Briar Hill, Camp Hill and East and West Hunsbury in the south of the town, mainly to accommodate the overflow population of new residents from the London area. In the town centre, older buildings were demolished and replaced or redeveloped for other buildings, including the former Greyfriars bus station, the Grosvenor Centre, Peacock Place (now Market Walk), shops, flats and hotels.


title: Northampton

text: Although growth was slower than planned, the population grew from 105,421 in 1961 to 157,217 by 1981, with 15,655 new homes added to the town between 1970 and 1985. The borough boundaries also changed following a split of the Northampton parliamentary constituency into Northampton North and Northampton South in 1974. Northampton was reconstituted as a non-metropolitan district which also covered areas outside the former borough boundaries but inside the designated New Town. The town tried for unitary status during the 1990s UK local government reform, but failed and it remained a non-metropolitan district until its abolition in 2021. On Good Friday 1998, Northampton suffered severe flooding, particularly in the areas of Far Cotton and St James; two people were killed and thousands of homes were affected.


title: Northampton

text: Since the turn of the Millennium, the town has continued to expand. Northampton applied for city status in 2000 to celebrate the new millennium, in 2002 to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Elizabeth II and most recently in 2022 to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II, but failed on all three occasions and remains a town. In 2006, Northampton became a government expansion zone with new growth promoted by West Northamptonshire Development Corporation (WNDC), an unelected quango, which has provoked a series of regeneration schemes across the town. Some have been completed, including the opening of the Radlands Plaza Skatepark and the development of Becket's Park Marina just south of Northampton's town centre, as well as the improvement of the town's Market Square, the building of the new North Gate bus station, the rebuilding of the railway station, the designation of a Cultural Quarter, the building of a new Council headquarters, the restoration of Delapré Abbey, the expansion of Northampton Museum, the resiting and rebuilding of the university on one new campus in town centre and the renovation of both the Grosvenor Shopping Centre and Weston Favell Centre. In 2015, St Giles Street in the town centre was named the "Best British High Street" in a national competition run by the Department for Communities and Local Government.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton was inaugurated as a constituency in 1295; that is (for many centuries) it returned two Members of Parliament (MPs) to the House of Commons. Spencer Perceval was elected as one of these in 1796 and became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1809, the only Solicitor General and only Attorney General to have done so, but also the only Prime Minister to be assassinated. The murder was by a highly disgruntled business owner John Bellingham in the House of Commons lobby in 1812. By the late 19th century, Northampton had acquired a reputation for political vanguardism. In 1880, radical non-conformist Charles Bradlaugh was elected as one of the MPs. During one of his election cross-candidate hustings a riot broke out in the Market Square. Local figures of authority called military to disperse it. For some decades from the 1918 general election representation was reduced to one MP.


title: Northampton

text: February 1974 general election saw the seat replaced by the new constituencies of Northampton North and Northampton South, which as all current ones do elect one MP. From the 2010 general election, new, South Northamptonshire took a southern sector of the borough.


title: Northampton

text: The town existed as an ancient borough in the medieval period before being one of the 178 boroughs to be reformed under the Municipal Corporations Act in 1835, with a democratically elected council replacing the corporation before it. Town government alternated between the Liberals and Conservatives, and the town achieved independence from Northamptonshire in 1888 when it became a county borough. It had 6 electoral wards from 1898, 9 wards from 1900 and 12 wards from 1911.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton was granted modern borough status in 1974, when it was reconstituted as a non-metropolitan district, a subdivision of its non-metropolitan county (Northamptonshire). From 1974 until 2021, the town had a two-tier structure of local government: the non-metropolitan district of Northampton was administered by both Northampton Borough Council and Northamptonshire County Council.


title: Northampton

text: Propositions for the borough to become a unitary authority failed during the 1990s local government reform and again, in 2011, when the motion was voted down by the council. However, in 2016, the borough council and all seven Northamptonshire MPs called for the existing eight Northamptonshire councils be scrapped for new unitary authorities.


title: Northampton

text: In March 2018, following suspension of the County Council arising from its becoming insolvent, due to financial and cultural mismanagement by the cabinet and officers, the then Secretary of State for Local Government, Sajid Javid, sent commissioner Max Caller into the council, who recommended the county council and all district and borough councils in the county be abolished, and replaced by two unitary authorities, one covering the West, and one the North of the county. These proposals were approved in April 2019. It meant that the districts of Daventry, Northampton and South Northamptonshire were merged to form a new unitary authority called West Northamptonshire, whilst the second unitary authority North Northamptonshire consists of Corby, East Northamptonshire, Kettering and Wellingborough districts. These new authorities came into being on 1 April 2021. Elections for the new authorities were due to be held on 7 May 2020, but these were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and took place in May 2021.


title: Northampton

text: A year prior to these changes, three new civil parishes were created in Northampton's urban area: a large parish covering the majority of the Northampton urban area was created, allowing Northampton to have a Town (parish) Council. Northampton Town Council is the largest parish level authority in England. In addition, two smaller parishes were created for the suburbs of Far Cotton & Delapre and Kingsthorpe.


title: Northampton

text: Policing in the town remains the responsibility of Northamptonshire Police; and firefighting, the responsibility of Northamptonshire Fire and Rescue Service. The Royal Anglian Regiment serves as the county regiment for Northamptonshire, with former county regiments being the Northamptonshire Regiment and the Northamptonshire Yeomanry


title: Northampton

text: NHS Northampton guides primary care services (general practitioners, dentists, opticians and pharmacists) in the town, directly provides adult social care and services in the community such as health visiting and physiotherapy and also funds hospital care and other specialist treatments. Northampton General Hospital is an NHS trust hospital which founded in 1744 and moved to its present site in 1793, and has continued to provide healthcare to the local community for more than 200 years. The East Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust is responsible for the provision of statutory emergency medical services in Northampton.


title: Northampton

text: St Andrew's Hospital, the flagship mental health facility of the private company St Andrew's Healthcare, is also based in Northampton. Originally opened in 1838 to serve Northampton, St Andrew's became a charity and private healthcare provider when the Berrywood Asylum (later the Northampton County Lunatic Asylum, then St Crispin Hospital in 1948, and since 2010 Berrywood Hospital) opened in 1876.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton is formally in the East Midlands region but is also referred to in Government planning as being part of the South Midlands "growth area". The town is south-southeast of Leicester, north-northwest of Milton Keynes, west of Cambridge, northeast of Oxford and the same distance southwest of Peterborough.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton is subdivided into suburbs, council wards, constituencies, ecclesiastical parishes, and other less formal areas.


title: Northampton

text: Concurrent with the abolition of the borough of Northampton in 2021, the unparished area of Northampton became parished with three new parish councils being established: A new Town Council covering the majority of the urban area of Northampton was established, whilst the areas of Kingsthorpe, and Far Cotton and Delapré also gained parish councils. In addition, there are nine registered parish councils which predate the abolition of the borough of Northampton. These are Billing, Collingtree, Duston, Great Houghton, Hardingstone, Hunsbury Meadow, Upton, West Hunsbury and Wootton & East Hunsbury.


title: Northampton

text: There are also settlements outside the town boundaries that are sometimes considered suburbs of Northampton, including Boughton, Cogenhoe, Ecton, Grange Park, Harpole, Little Houghton, Moulton, Overstone and Rothersthorpe.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton's nearest towns are Wellingborough, Daventry and Towcester. The nearest cities are Milton Keynes, Leicester, Coventry and Peterborough.


title: Northampton

text: As with the rest of the British Isles, Northampton experiences a maritime climate with cool summers and mild winters. The official Met Office weather station for Northampton is the Moulton Park Weather Station at the University of Northampton. Situated at an elevation of around above sea level compared to Northampton town centre at , it is one of the highest points in the town, and so may not be a perfect representation of Northampton as a whole. Its hilltop location means less pooling of cold air on calm clear nights, and lower maxima during summer. The absolute maximum recorded is on 3 August 1990. A high of was recorded on 19 July 2006, However, a maximum temperature of was recorded on 19 July 2022 at Pitsford, located from the town centre. The absolute minimum is , recorded during February 1986. It is likely the absolute maximum in the town centre is a degree or so higher owing to the lower elevation, and absolute minimum on the eastern and western edges of the urban area around the Nene valley a couple of degrees colder due to katabatic drainage of cold air allowing a frost hollow effect. Most recently, the temperature fell to on 20 December 2010.


title: Northampton

text: Rainfall, at around per year is not high, though is often unpredictable, giving rise to flooding events such as 1998, but also short term droughts. Desborough Weather Station also supplies the public with a local weather service.


title: Northampton

text: Since 1991, the population of the town has increased 17.41% from 180,617 to 212,069 in 2011, with a mean age in 2011 of 37.1 years, younger than the English average of 39.3 years. The population breaks down into 104,168 males, and 107,901 females, with a population density of 2,630 per km.


title: Northampton

text: At the 2011 census, there were 91,484 dwellings, 88,731 of which are occupied households. Some 30.5% (27,048) of these were one person households, 61.1% (54,125) contained families, and 8.5% (7,558) fell into the other household type category. Home tenure was reported as 37.5% of 88,731 households mortgaged, 25.1% owned outright, 16.5% privately rented, 12.8% rented from council, 4.3% social rented, 1.3% private (other) rented, 1.3% shared ownership and 1.2% rent free.


title: Northampton

text: 75.6% of households had at least one car or van, 22.5% of residents over the age of 16 had no formal qualifications, and 15.8% have at least 5 GCSEs of grade C or above.


title: Northampton

text: The median income for all workers (in 2012) was £21,193, slightly below both the county average of £21,560, and the England average of £21,794.


title: Northampton

text: Between 2001 and 2011, the greatest nominal population increase was in the White, Other group from 3,780 to 13,825 – an increase of 10,045 – likely due to migration from Eastern Europe. The largest growth relative to their 2001 numbers was in the Black, African group, recording a 376% increase from 1,361 to 6,473. The largest nominal fall in population was in respondents reporting as White, British, there being 8,146 fewer such residents in 2011 than 10 years previous. The largest fall relative to their 2001 numbers was in the White, Irish group, their count falling 20.3% from 3,838 down to 3,060.


title: Northampton

text: In terms of religion, 56.6% of residents described themselves as Christian, 29.4% reported no religion, 4.2% Muslim, 1.6% Hindu, 0.5% Sikh, 0.5% Other, 0.4% Buddhist and 0.1% Judaism. 6.7% failed to report any affiliation.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton was a major centre of shoemaking and other leather industries, although only specialist shoemaking companies such as Barker Shoes, Church's, Crockett & Jones, Edward Green, Tricker's, (formerly located in nearby Earls Barton), and Wildsmith, survive. A large number of old shoe factories remain, mostly now converted to offices or accommodation, some of which are surrounded by terraced houses built for factory workers.


title: Northampton

text: Engineering became a major employer in Northampton during the post war years following the establishment of the British Timken tapered roller bearing factory at Duston in 1941 as a "shadow factory" for the main site in Birmingham during the Second World War. The factory which closed in 2002 employed over 4,000 employees at its peak and was a major engineering apprentice training employer.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton's main private-sector employers are now in distribution and finance rather than manufacturing, and include Avon Products, Barclaycard, Blacks Leisure Group, Nationwide Building Society (Anglia Building Society was formed by amalgamation of Northampton Town and County Building Society with Leicestershire Building Society in 1966 and subsequently merged with the Nationwide in 1987), Panasonic, Travis Perkins, Coca-Cola, Schweppes, Simply Business, National Grid, Texas Instruments and Carlsberg. In 1974, Princess Benedikte of Denmark opened Northampton's Carlsberg brewery, the first outside Denmark. The University of Northampton is also a major employer, as is St Andrew's Healthcare, a national mental health charity. St Andrew's Hospital, its flagship hospital and the United Kingdom's largest psychiatric hospital, is based in Northampton. In 2014, Experian named Northampton as "the best place in the UK to start and run a business." In 2017, the town's annual economic output, as measured by gross value added, was worth £7.31 billion.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton was expected to be affected by the insolvency of Northamptonshire County Council in 2018, as the council implemented significant budget cuts for two years. That was expected to include maintenance of only the "bare legal minimum of service, focused only on the most vulnerable residents".


title: Northampton

text: Health inequality in Northampton is high, with the life expectancy gap between the least deprived and most deprived men reaching over a decade. Additionally, the constituency is 'considerably worse than [the] England average' in violent crime, self harm, under 18 conception and GCSE achievement.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton's market square is one of Britain's largest and dates back to 1235. The market square is linked to Abington Street, a major shopping area of Northampton. The western part of the street was pedestrianised in 1984. Further east, part was pedestrianised in 1995 and de-pedestrianised in 2014. The east end (beyond York Road) has never been pedestrianised. There are also two indoor shopping centres in the town centre: the Grosvenor Centre, which was built in the 1970s, and Market Walk (previously Peacock Place), which was constructed in 1988. St James Retail Park is also a large shopping precinct just south of the town centre. Other out-of-town retail parks exist: Weston Favell Shopping Centre, built in the 1970s, and Riverside Retail Park in the east of the town, as well as Sixfields in the west. Each precinct has a range of high street shops, department stores and many smaller individual speciality shops.


title: Northampton

text: Billing Aquadrome leisure park is on the eastern outskirts. It has a caravan site, marina, funfair, bar, riverside restaurant and converted water mill with original workings. The Northampton Leisure Trust has four leisure centres across Northampton: Danes Camp, Lings Forum, Mounts Baths and Duston Sports Centre. There are also the action centres Benham Sports Arena and King's Park Tennis Centre as well as the Delapré Public Golf Course. Radlands Plaza is a new skatepark that opened in 2012.


title: Northampton

text: According to the website of the (former) Northampton Borough Council, there are a total of 170 parks and open spaces around Northampton, which altogether span around . Popular parks include Abington Park, which is the town's oldest, and the Racecourse, which was used for horseracing (until 1904) and as a cricket ground (between 1844 and 1885) in addition to being the original home of Northampton Balloon Festival. Other parks include Becket's Park (which is named after Thomas Becket as are nearby Becket's Well and Thomas á Becket pub), Bradlaugh Fields (named after the Northampton MP Charles Bradlaugh), Dallington Park, Delapré Park, Eastfield Park, Hunsbury Hill (which is built around an Iron Age hillfort), Kingsthorpe Park and Victoria Park.


title: Northampton

text: Popular annual events include Northampton Carnival, the Beer Festival, the Dragonboat Race, the Umbrella Fair, Diwali celebrations and St Crispins Fair. Northampton Balloon Festival used to be a major event in Northampton, but since being scaled down, it has been poorly attended. Northampton Music Festival has been celebrated every year since 2007 in the town centre. A smaller music festival A Walk in the Park has been put on since 2008 in Wootton. A new music festival, Alive at Delapré, debuted in the summer of 2013 and has since attracted artists like Alfie Boe, Boyzone, Jessie J, James Morrison, McBusted, Paul Weller and The Wanted.


title: Northampton

text: The Royal & Derngate theatre complex, on Guildhall Road in the Cultural Quarter of the town centre, is one of the main venues for arts and entertainment in Northampton. The Deco, situated in Abington Square in the town centre, is a 900-seat theatre and conference centre, which shares its Art Deco building with the Northampton Jesus Centre. It was restored by the Jesus Army as part of their Jesus Centre project. The Deco used to be a cinema in the 1960s; The Beatles appeared there twice on stage in 1963: firstly as unknowns as part of the Tommy Roe/Chris Montez tour; secondly as part of their own tour in their own right. Smaller theatres include the Northampton Playhouse and the Cripps Theatre, which is part of Northampton School for Boys.


title: Northampton

text: The two commercial cinemas in Northampton are Vue at Sol Central in the centre and Cineworld at Sixfields. There is also the subsidised Forum Cinema at Lings Forum, whose film programme is widely varied and includes art-house and non-mainstream films. The Northampton Filmhouse, an independent cinema joined to the side of the Royal & Derngate theatre complex, opened in June 2013.


title: Northampton

text: There are also many local entertainment venues which provide events. The Roadmender, which used to be run and funded by the council and later bought by The Purplehaus group, hosts mainstream touring bands and one off-gigs. There are other popular late-night entertainment venues, pubs, bars and clubs in the town centre, and along the Wellingborough and Kettering Roads on the way into the town centre. Northampton also has ten-pin bowling alleys and late night casinos.


title: Northampton

text: The Northamptonshire Central Library in town centre is a Grade II listed building which was erected in 1910. There are seven other public libraries that are dotted across Northampton—in Abington, Duston, Far Cotton, Hunsbury, Kingsthorpe, St James, Wootton—all run by Northamptonshire County Council.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton Museum and Art Gallery on Guildhall Road in the Cultural Quarter has a collection of historical footwear (one of the world's largest at 13,000), Italian art, glass and ceramics, plus visiting exhibitions and local history. There is also a smaller Grade I listed historical museum in the former Abington Park house which mainly has history on domestic life in the town and the Northamptonshire Regiment. 78 Derngate, the only house in England designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, includes a museum celebrating Mackintosh, an art gallery and a restaurant.


title: Northampton

text: The Northampton Arts Collective is homed on a four-storey building entitled NN in the Cultural Quarter, opposite the Northampton Museum and next to the Royal & Derngate theatre complex. They relocated from the Old Fishmarket which was demolished to make way for the North Gate bus station. The Avenue Gallery, is at the Avenue campus of the University of Northampton. The university also spent £3m on its Portfolio Innovation Centre in early 2011, which houses around 60 creative freelancers, digital media developers, and designers. Other art galleries include Collective Collaborations, Artist's Sanctuary, Albus3, Gallery 177 and Primose Gallery. Northamptonshire also runs an annual county-wide Open Studios event celebrating visual arts in which artists' studios are open to the public.


title: Northampton

text: The composers Malcolm Arnold, William Alwyn, Trevor Hold, Edmund Rubbra and Robert Walker were born in Northampton. Northampton also boasts one of the oldest community orchestras in the U.K. - the Northampton Symphony Orchestra, which started life in 1896 as Saint Celia's Orchestral Society. Gothic rock band Bauhaus formed in Northampton, often cited as the godfathers of goth, they helped pioneer the genre during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. The popular UK rapper Slowthai was born in Northampton and frequently talks about his life growing up there in his music.


title: Northampton

text: The town is home to Premiership rugby union team Northampton Saints, who play at Franklin's Gardens in the St James area. "The Saints" had their greatest moment when they won the Heineken Cup in 2000 at Twickenham, beating Munster 9–8. There are also a number of "Junior" rugby clubs in the area, the most successful of these at producing young players is Northampton Old Scouts RFC who have produced Ben Cohen and Steve Thompson amongst others. Northampton is also home to Northampton Outlaws, its first inclusive rugby team and the 9th gay-friendly team in the United Kingdom.


title: Northampton

text: There are also three non-league clubs in the United Counties Football League: Northampton Spencer; Northampton Sileby Rangers; and Northampton Old Northamptonian Chenecks.


title: Northampton

text: Northamptonshire County Cricket Club, known in limited overs cricket as "The Steelbacks" (a reference to the Northamptonshire Regiment which was formed in 1881), is one of the 18 major county clubs which make up the English and Welsh domestic cricket structure. The club was promoted from Division 2 of the County Championship in 2019, and play in Group C of the Clydesdale Bank 40 League and the Midlands/Wales/West group of the revamped Friends Provident T20. They are based at the County Ground, in the Abington area.


title: Northampton

text: The Silverstone Circuit, current home of the British Grand Prix, is a few miles south of Northampton. Rockingham Motor Speedway and Santa Pod Raceway are a few miles north and east of Northampton respectively, the latter offering a range of drag racing events.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton is also home to Collingtree Park Golf Club, which hosted the British Masters in 1995. There are also many equestrian and country activities, and several water sports centres, such as the Nene Whitewater Centre, which provides an artificial whitewater course for canoes, kayaks and rafts. The Northampton Swimming Club also trained the young Olympic swimmer Caitlin McClatchey.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton is also home to Be Military Fit in Abington Park where members can train up to 7 times a week with serving or ex-military fitness instructors.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton Greyhound Stadium hosted greyhound racing from 1928 to 1964 and speedway from 1929 to 1930.


title: Northampton

text: The "Northampton Chronicle & Echo" (established 1931) is the town's newspaper, published on Thursdays (before 2012, it was published Monday to Saturday) with jobs, property, motors and entertainment supplements. There are other free newspapers circulated within the town. These include "The Mercury" (on Thursdays) and "Northants on Sunday", both from the publishers of the "Chronicle & Echo", and the "Northampton Herald & Post" (on Thursdays). These free papers mostly consist of advertising and have limited news. "The Mercury" was one of the oldest newspapers still in circulation first published in 1720, founded by William Dicey, an ancestor of the public law commentator, A.V. Dicey. It was the fifth-oldest such newspaper in the United Kingdom and the tenth-oldest such in the world.


title: Northampton

text: Four radio stations are based in the town, one of which broadcast county-wide. BBC Radio Northampton broadcasts news, topical items and some music, switching to a regional network after 7 pm. Three community radio stations serve the town: Inspiration FM, NLive Radio (Formerly NNBC), Revolution Radio and Embrace Radio.


title: Northampton

text: Revolution Radio was awarded a 5-year licence on 16 July 2020, and launched at 2 pm on Saturday 12 June 2021. The first song played was 'Revolution Radio' by Green Day. The transmitter is on top of Northampton Lift Tower and broadcasts on 96.1 FM.


title: Northampton

text: Inspiration FM was awarded a 5-year licence in July 2008 and officially launched in July 2010. The station broadcasts on FM 107.8


title: Northampton

text: NNBC launched in September 2016 as a joint venture with the University of Northampton. As of 30 September 2017, the station was re-branded as NLive Radio. The station marked the re-branding with a live broadcast from Market Square on 30 September. Later that same evening, the station ran a live evening of music from a music venue in Northampton. The evening of music was headlined by Hana Brooks and broadcast live on the station under the banner 'Shoetown Sounds'.


title: Northampton

text: A new community radio station, Embrace Radio, launched on 5 March 2022. It serves the town on FM 104.7.


title: Northampton

text: Regional TV news is broadcast on the BBC East service (terrestrial, satellite and cable) with a main programme, BBC Look East, and on ITV News Anglia. From 1997 to 2004, Northampton has been used as a location for television, film and theatre. Northampton Castle is featured in William Shakespeare's history play "King John" and in "Becket", a play by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The town was the location for the BBC sitcom "Keeping Up Appearances" from 1990 until 1995. Parts of the 2005 film "Kinky Boots" were also made in Northampton and featured shots of the statue outside the Grosvenor Centre in the town centre and inside RE Tricker's shoe factory in St. Michaels Road representing the original factory in Earls Barton. The film was turned into a musical "Kinky Boots", maintaining its Northampton backdrop, which premiered on Broadway in 2013 and won 6 Tony Awards. It transferred to the West End in London in 2015 and won 3 Olivier Awards. In addition, BBC Three shows "Bizarre ER" and "Junior Paramedics" were filmed in Northampton.


title: Northampton

text: The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, is one of the largest and best-preserved round churches in England. It was built in 1100 on the orders of the first Earl of Northampton, Simon de Senlis and based on a plan of the original Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.


title: Northampton

text: Simon de Senlis also built Northampton Castle c. 1084, which was for many years one of the country's most important castles. It was a royal residence, held The Parliament of England many times, and was the site of royal tournaments and feasts. Thomas Becket was imprisoned there until he escaped. The castle suffered many fates and was eventually demolished to make way for the railway station in 1879. A postern, dismantled from its original position and rebuilt into a wall by the station, and a part of the keep mound are all that remains.


title: Northampton

text: The current All Saints' Church was built on the site of a great Norman church, All Hallows, which was almost completely destroyed by the Great Fire of Northampton in 1675. All that remained was the medieval tower and the fine vaulted crypt, but by 1680 All Saints' had been rebuilt, with the help of donations from all over England, including 1,000 tons of timber from King Charles II, whose statue can be seen above the portico. Famously, the poet John Clare liked to sit beneath the portico of the church. It is home to a choral foundation.


title: Northampton

text: Other notable church buildings include Northampton Cathedral, the mother church of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Northampton and seat of the Bishop of Northampton; St Peter's (mostly built in Norman times); St Giles' Church; St Matthew's in Phippsville, which was built between 1891 and 1894, has a Henry Moore sculpture of the Madonna. St Edmund's Church (built in 1850) closed in 1978 and was demolished in 1980 (its bells are now in Saint Paul's Cathedral, Wellington).


title: Northampton

text: Just south of the town centre Delapré Abbey, a former Cluniac nunnery, the County Records Office and site of the second Battle of Northampton, which was founded by Simon II de Senlis, the son of first Earl of Northampton, in 1145. At the edge of the Abbey, one of the three standing Eleanor crosses still remains, in memory of Eleanor of Castile, whose body rested here on its way to London. The original top of the monument has been knocked off and replaced several times from as early as 1460.


title: Northampton

text: St Andrew's Hospital, which opened 1838, and its new building William Wake House, is one of the largest neo-classical structures in England. Northampton & County Club, which was established in 1873, was also the old county hospital before becoming a private members' club; the cellars are medieval. Northampton Guildhall, which is Grade II* listed, was constructed mostly in the 1860s in Victorian Gothic architecture designed by Edward William Godwin, and extended in 1889–92 and in the 1990s. The Clare Street drill hall was completed in 1859.


title: Northampton

text: 78 Derngate is a Grade II* listed Georgian Town House remodelled by Charles Rennie Mackintosh for Wenman Joseph Bassett-Lowke in 1916–17. It contains notable Mackintosh interiors (which have been restored) and is his only major domestic commission outside Scotland. It is open to the public. One of these Derngate buildings was previously home to Northampton High School, an independent Northampton girls' school.


title: Northampton

text: The tall National Lift Tower is a dominant feature and visible from most of the town. A Terry Wogan radio phone-in during the 1980s came up with the name "Northampton Lighthouse" as Northampton is one of the furthest places from the sea. It is also known as the "Cobblers' Needle". It was built for testing new lifts at the Express Lifts factory, now closed. Though now redundant, it is a listed building.


title: Northampton

text: The former Greyfriars bus station served the town from 1976 until 2014. In the 2000s, it was featured on Channel 4's "Demolition" programme as the ugliest transport station in the United Kingdom and worthy of demolition. Demolition work began in March 2014, following the move of bus services to North Gate bus station. The Greyfriars was completely destroyed on 15 March 2015 by way of a controlled explosion.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton contains several significant war memorials. The Town and County War Memorial, unveiled in 1926, commemorates casualties of the First World War from all of Northamptonshire; it replaced a temporary cenotaph which stood in Abington Square from 1919. Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, it consists of two large obelisks and an altar-like stone sited in a small garden behind All Saints' Church. The Town and County memorial is a grade I listed building and part of a national collection of Lutyens' war memorials. As the Town and County memorial does not contain a list of names of the fallen, the Royal British Legion launched a campaign which resulted in the construction of a second memorial, dedicated solely to the town; this memorial, in Abington Square, takes the form of a garden of remembrance with the names of the dead inscribed on the garden walls. A bust of Edgar Mobbs was later moved into the garden; Mobbs was a rugby player for Northampton Saints who was killed while serving in the First World War.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton is served by junctions 15, 15a and 16 of the M1 motorway which connects the town with London at its most southern point and Leeds at its most northern. Both the A45 and A43 link Northampton with the other major towns in Northamptonshire and beyond, and can be accessed by a partially completed ring road. The A14 is close by to the north of Northampton, providing links to East Anglia and a secondary route to the areas of the Midlands which are situated to the north of the town.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton railway station is on the Northampton Loop of the West Coast Main Line, and has services southbound to London Euston and northbound to Birmingham and Crewe provided by West Midlands Trains. Avanti West Coast also provide two daily services to London, although these are set-down only.


title: Northampton

text: Sywell Aerodrome is the nearest airfield which has recently been upgraded with a concrete runway, however it only caters for private flying, flight training and corporate flights. For international links, the East Midlands Airport and Luton Airport are quickly accessible by the M1; Birmingham Airport is also around to the north-west of the town via the M1 and M6 motorways and also by train.


title: Northampton

text: In the town, buses are mainly operated by Stagecoach Midlands from the North Gate bus station with some services from Uno. Stagecoach serves areas within the town and also provides travel to outlying villages and towns within the county, making links to Corby, Daventry, Kettering, Rushden and Wellingborough. They also go as far afield as Bedford, Leicester, Market Harborough, Milton Keynes, Peterborough and Rugby. Uno serve the university and Kingsthorpe area as well as Rectory Farm, Abington and Sixfields. National Express also operates in Northampton, covering routes between major towns and cities in the United Kingdom. Buses used to be operated by Northampton Corporation Transport and then, since the privatization of buses in the 1980s. FirstGroup operated them until the 2010s and Arriva operate 2 services around the town (33 and 33x)


title: Northampton

text: Northampton is the terminus of an arm of the Grand Union Canal, which connects to the River Nene and from that to the River Great Ouse and the North Sea. No longer used for freight, the waterway is now popular with anglers and narrowboaters. Principal outlying villages on the canal include Gayton, Blisworth, Braunston and Stoke Bruerne.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton once had a horse-drawn tramway which opened in 1881. The system was extended in stages and taken over by the council in 1897 and named Northampton Corporation Tramways. It was electrified in 1904, but closed in 1934 mainly as a result of competition from motor buses which were introduced in 1929. Two of the original tram shelters are preserved: one at the Racecourse park and another in Kingsthorpe opposite the Cock Hotel.


title: Northampton

text: The first University of Northampton was established by royal charter by King Henry III in 1261, and started to rival the universities in Cambridge and Oxford, with their students migrating to the Northampton establishment. This university was dissolved by King Henry III in 1265, in revenge of its students siding with the rebellious barons in the Battle of Northampton (1264). Henry III was also advised by bishops and magnates that it posed a threat to Oxford, and signed a Royal Decree which banned the establishment of a university in Northampton.


title: Northampton

text: This was eventually repealed and the university's name was revived in 2005 when the unconnected University College Northampton, which was founded in 1924, was upgraded to full university status and renamed the University of Northampton. This is the only higher education (HE) establishment in the town and offers courses from foundation and undergraduate levels to postgraduate, professional and doctoral qualifications. The university is made of up six schools: Business, Education, Health, Science and Technology, Social Sciences and The Arts. The university was originally spread over two campuses across the town, but moved to its new £330 million waterside campus by the River Nene in the town centre in 2018.


title: Northampton

text: Northampton's only further education (FE) college is Northampton College, one of the largest FE colleges in the South Midlands, which has two campuses across the town, offering vocational courses, GCSEs and A Levels. Moulton College is another FE college just north of Northampton which provides many vocational courses, specialising in land-based subjects, sports and construction. In collaboration with the University of Northampton, both colleges also offer some HE programmes.


title: Northampton

text: There are 50 primary schools and 8 secondary schools in the town. Until 2004, Northamptonshire operated a three-tier system in education of lower, middle and upper schools. In 2001, the move to a two-tier system to primary and secondary schools began, aimed at improving educational standards. Some of its successful secondary schools include Northampton School for Boys, which became the top performing comprehensive school in the country in 2007, and Northampton School for Girls, the first school in England to gain Specialist Music College status. An average of 55% of students in Northampton achieved five A*-C grades at GCSE in 2015, above the government's benchmark of 40%. There are also 5 special schools in the town. Northampton High School is an independent school for girls.


title: Northampton

text: The following people, military units, and organisations have received the Freedom of the Borough of Northampton.


title: Spoon theory

text: The spoon theory is a metaphor describing the amount of physical and/or mental energy that a person has available for daily activities and tasks, and how it can become limited. It was coined by writer and blogger Christine Miserandino in 2003 as a way to express how it felt to have lupus; using spoons at a restaurant to represent units of energy that a person might have to a friend, she reduced the spoons to represent how chronic illness forced her to plan out days and actions in advance so as to try to not run out of energy. It has since been used to describe a wide range of disabilities, mental health issues, forms of marginalization, and other factors that might place an extra and often unseen burden on people living with them.


title: Spoon theory

text: The idea was coined by Christine Miserandino in her 2003 essay "The Spoon Theory". While out at a restaurant, to eat with a friend, Miserandino's friend began watching her as she took her medication, and suddenly asked what it was like to have lupus. Miserandino grabbed spoons from around the diner where they sat and gave her friend the handful of spoons she had gathered. The spoons helped Miserandino to show the way that people with chronic illness often start their days off with limited quantities of energy. The number of spoons her friend had represented how much energy she had to spend throughout the day.


title: Spoon theory

text: As Miserandino's friend stated the different tasks she completes throughout the day, Miserandino took away a spoon for each activity. She took spoon after spoon until her friend only had one spoon left. Her friend then stated that she was hungry, to which Miserandino replied that eating would use another spoon. If she were to cook, a spoon would be needed for cooking. She would have to select her next move wisely to conserve her energy for the rest of the night.


title: Spoon theory

text: Those with chronic illness or pain have reported feelings of difference and division between themselves and people without disabilities. This theory and the claiming of the term "spoonie" is utilized to build communities for those with chronic illness that can support each other.


title: Spoon theory

text: Spoons are a visual representation used as a unit of measure to quantify the amount of mental and physical energy a person has available for activities of living and productive tasks throughout a given amount of time (e.g. a day or week). Each activity requires a number of spoons, which will only be replaced as the person "recharges" through rest. A person who runs out of spoons has no choice but to rest until their spoons are replenished. This is not to say that rest is certain to give a person more spoons. For many people with chronic illness, sleep does not perform its normal function of restoring energy. Also, many disabled individuals may have sleep difficulties, resulting in a continued low supply of energy.


title: Spoon theory

text: Because of this, many people with chronic illness have to plan around and ration their energy throughout the day. This has been described as being a major concern of people with a (fatigue-related) disability or chronic condition/illness/disease because people without these disabilities are not typically concerned with the energy expended during ordinary tasks such as bathing and getting dressed. The theory explains the difference and facilitates discussion between those with limited energy reserves and those with (seemingly) limitless energy reserves.


title: Spoon theory

text: Spoon theory has since spread throughout the disability community and even to marginalized groups to describe the exhaustion that may characterize their specific situations. It is most commonly used to refer to the experience of having an invisible disability, because people with no outward symptoms or symbols of their condition are often perceived as lazy, inconsistent or having poor time management skills by those who have no first-hand knowledge of living with a chronic illness or disability. Naomi Chainey has described how the term has also spread to use by some in the wider disability community, and eventually the non-disabled community tried to appropriate it for other uses, to refer to non-chronic forms of fatigue and mental exhaustion – which she attributes to people with invisible disabilities being a sometimes marginalized group even within the disability community.


title: Spoon theory

text: Those with mental health issues such as anxiety or depression may similarly find it challenging to go about seemingly simple tasks throughout the day, or to deal with a crisis. Spoon theory could even be used to show the exhaustion of having a new born baby as this time may lead to a lack of sleep.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: The Hardy Boys, brothers Frank and Joe Hardy, are fictional characters who appear in several mystery series for children and teens. The series revolves around teenagers who are amateur sleuths, solving cases that stumped their adult counterparts. The characters were created by American writer Edward Stratemeyer, the founder of book-packaging firm Stratemeyer Syndicate. The books themselves were written by several ghostwriters, most notably Leslie McFarlane, under the collective pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: The Hardy Boys have evolved since their debut in 1927. From 1959 to 1973, the first 38 books were extensively revised, largely to remove depictions of racial stereotypes; they were also targeted towards younger readers by being rewritten in a simpler, action-oriented style to compete with television.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: A new "Hardy Boys" series, the "Hardy Boys Casefiles", was created in 1987, and featured murders, violence, and international espionage. The original "Hardy Boys Mystery Stories" series ended in 2005. A new series, "Undercover Brothers", was launched the same year, featuring updated versions of the characters who narrate their adventures in the first person. "Undercover Brothers" ended in 2012 and was replaced in 2013 by "The Hardy Boys Adventures", also narrated in the first person.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: Through these changes the characters have remained popular; the books sell more than a million copies annually, several new volumes are published each year, and the adventures have been translated into over 25 languages. The boys have been featured in five television shows and several video games, and have helped promote merchandise such as lunchboxes and jeans. Critics have many explanations for the characters' longevity, suggesting that the Hardy Boys embody wish fulfillment, American ideals of boyhood and masculinity, a well-respected father paradoxically argued to be inept in the later books, and the possibility of the triumph of good over evil.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: The Hardy Boys, Frank and Joe Hardy, are fictional teenage brothers and amateur detectives. Frank is eighteen (sixteen in earlier versions), and Joe is seventeen (fifteen in earlier versions). They live in the city of Bayport on Barmet Bay with their father, detective Fenton Hardy; their mother, Laura Hardy; and their Aunt Gertrude. The brothers attend high school in Bayport, where they are in the same grade, but school is rarely mentioned in the books and never hinders their solving of mysteries. In the older stories, the Boys' mysteries are often linked to their father's confidential cases. He sometimes requests their assistance, while at other times they stumble upon relevant villains and incidents. In the "Undercover Brothers" series (2005–2012), the Hardys are members of and receive cases from American Teens Against Crime. The Hardy Boys are sometimes assisted in solving mysteries by their friends Chet Morton, Phil Cohen, Biff Hooper, Jerry Gilroy, and Tony Prito; and, less frequently, by their platonic girlfriends Callie Shaw and Iola Morton (Chet's sister).


title: The Hardy Boys

text: In each novel, the Hardy Boys are constantly involved in adventure and action. Despite the frequent danger, the boys "never lose their nerve ... They "are" hardy boys, luckier and more clever than anyone around them." They live in an atmosphere of mystery and intrigue: "Never were so many assorted felonies committed in a simple American small town. Murder, drug peddling, race-horse kidnapping, diamond smuggling, bank robbing, kidnapping, dynamiting, burglaries, medical malpractice, big-time auto theft, even (in the 1940s) the hijacking of strategic materials and espionage, all were conducted with Bayport as a nucleus." With so much in common, the boys are so little differentiated that one commentator facetiously describes them thus: "The boys' characters basically broke down this way – Frank had dark hair; Joe was blond." In general, however, "Frank was the thinker while Joe was more impulsive, and perhaps a little more athletic." The two boys are invariably on good terms with each other and never engage in sibling rivalry, except in the "Undercover Brothers" series.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: Frank and Joe are somewhat wealthy and often travel to far-away locations, including Mexico in "The Mark on the Door" (1934), Scotland in "The Secret Agent on Flight 101" (1967), Iceland in "The Arctic Patrol Mystery" (1969), Egypt in "The Mummy Case" (1980), and Kenya in "The Mystery of the Black Rhino" (2003). The Hardys also travel across the United States by motorcycle, motorboat, iceboat, train, airplane, and their own car.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: The characters were conceived in 1926 by Edward Stratemeyer, founder of book-packaging firm Stratemeyer Syndicate. Stratemeyer pitched the series to publishers Grosset & Dunlap and suggested that the boys be called the Keene Boys, the Scott Boys, the Hart Boys, or the Bixby Boys. Grosset & Dunlap editors approved the project, but, for reasons unknown, chose the name "The Hardy Boys". The first three titles were published in 1927, and were an immediate success: by mid-1929, more than 115,000 books had been sold. So successful was the series that Stratemeyer created Nancy Drew as a female counterpart to the Hardys.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: Each volume is penned by a ghostwriter under the pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon. In accordance with the customs of Stratemeyer Syndicate series production, ghostwriters for the Syndicate signed contracts that have sometimes been interpreted as requiring authors to sign away all rights to authorship or future royalties. The contracts stated that authors could not use their Stratemeyer Syndicate pseudonyms independently of the Syndicate. In the early days of the Syndicate, ghostwriters were paid a fee of $125, "roughly equivalent to two months' wages for a typical newspaper reporter, the primary day job of the syndicate ghosts." During the Great Depression this fee was lowered, first to $100 and later to $75. All royalties went to the Syndicate; all correspondence with the publisher was handled through a Stratemeyer Syndicate office, and the Syndicate was able to enlist the cooperation of libraries in hiding the ghostwriters' names.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: The Syndicate's process for creating the "Hardy Boys" books consisted of creating a detailed outline, with all elements of the plot; drafting a manuscript, and editing the manuscript. Edward Stratemeyer's daughter, Edna Stratemeyer Squier, and possibly Stratemeyer himself, wrote outlines for the first volumes in the series. Beginning in 1934, Stratemeyer's other daughter, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, began contributing plot outlines; she and Andrew Svenson wrote most of the plot outlines for the next several decades. Other plot outliners included Vincent Buranelli, James Duncan Lawrence, and Tom Mulvey.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: Most of the early volumes were written by Canadian Leslie McFarlane, who authored nineteen of the first twenty-five titles and co-authored volume 17 "The Secret Warning", between 1927 and 1946. Unlike many other Syndicate ghostwriters, McFarlane was regarded highly enough by the Syndicate that he was frequently given advances of $25 or $50, and during the Depression, when fees were lowered, he was paid $85 for each Hardy Boys book when other Syndicate ghostwriters were receiving only $75 for their productions. According to McFarlane's family, he despised the series and its characters.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: After co-authoring Volume 17, John Button, with Volume 18, "The Twisted Claw" (1939), took over the series full-time until 1942; McFarlane resumed with Volume 22, "The Flickering Torch Mystery" (1943). McFarlane's last contribution was Volume 24, "The Short-Wave Mystery" (1945); his wife, Amy, authored Volume 26, "The Phantom Freighter" (1947). Over the next several decades, other volumes were written by Adams, Svenson, Lawrence, Buranelli, William Dougherty, and James Buechler. Beginning in 1959, the series was extensively revised and re-written. Many authors worked on the revised books, writing new manuscripts; some of them also wrote plot outlines and edited the books. Among the authors who worked on the revised versions were Adams, Svenson, Buechler, Lilo Wuenn, Anne Shultes, Alistair Hunter, Tom Mulvey, Patricia Doll, and Priscilla Baker-Carr.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: In 1979, the "Hardy Boys" books began to be published in paperback rather than hardcover. Lawrence and Buranelli continued to write titles; other authors included Karl Harr III and Laurence Swinburne. In 1984, the rights to the series were sold, along with the Stratemeyer Syndicate, to Simon & Schuster. New York book packager Mega-Books subsequently hired authors to write the "Hardy Boys Mystery Stories" and a new series, the "Hardy Boys Casefiles".


title: The Hardy Boys

text: In 1980, dissatisfied with the lack of creative control at Grosset & Dunlap and the lack of publicity for the "Hardy Boys"' 50th anniversary in 1977, Harriet Adams (née Stratemeyer) switched publishers for the "Hardy Boys" and "Nancy Drew", as well as other series, to Simon & Schuster. Grosset & Dunlap filed suit against the Syndicate and Simon & Schuster, citing "breach of contract, copyright infringement, and unfair competition" and requesting $300 million in damages.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: The outcome of the case turned largely on the question of who had written the "Nancy Drew" series. Adams filed a countersuit, claiming that, as the author of the "Nancy Drew Mystery Stories", she retained the rights to her work. Although Adams had written many "Nancy Drew" titles after 1953 and edited others, she claimed to be the author of all of the early titles. In fact, she had rewritten the older titles, but was not the original author. When Mildred Benson, the author of the early "Nancy Drew" volumes, was called to testify about her work for the Syndicate, Benson's role in writing the manuscripts of early titles was revealed in court with extensive documentation, contradicting Adams' claims to authorship. The court ruled that Grosset had the rights to publish the original series of both "Nancy Drew" and the "Hardy Boys" as they were in print in 1980, but did not own characters or trademarks. Furthermore, any new publishers chosen by Adams were completely within their rights to print new titles.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: The Hardy Boys have gone through many permutations over the years. Beginning in 1959, the books were extensively revised, and some commentators find that the Hardys' characters changed in the process. Commentators also sometimes see differences between the Hardy Boys of the original "Hardy Boys Mystery Stories" and the Hardy Boys of the "Hardy Boys Casefiles" or the "Undercover Brothers" series.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: The early volumes, largely written by Leslie McFarlane, have been praised for their atmosphere and writing style, qualities often considered lacking in juvenile series books. McFarlane's writing is clear and filled with specific details, making his works superior to many other Stratemeyer series titles. Such, at least, was McFarlane's intention: "It seemed to me the Hardy Boys deserved something better than the slapdash treatment Dave Fearless had been getting... I opted for Quality." The volumes not written by McFarlane or his wife were penned by John Button, who wrote the series from 1938 to 1942; this period is sometimes referred to as the "Weird Period" as the writing is full of inconsistencies and the Hardy Boys' adventures involve futuristic gadgetry and exotic locations.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: In general, the world of these early volumes is a "[dark] and ... divided place." In these early titles, the boys are cynical about human nature, an attitude apparently justified when the police, whom they have repeatedly helped, throw them into jail on slim evidence in "The Great Airport Mystery" (1930). The police and authority figures, in general, come off poorly in these books, so much so that at one point Edward Stratemeyer wrote McFarlane to reprimand him for "grievous lack of respect for officers of the law." The Hardys are less affluent than earlier Stratemeyer characters; they eagerly accept cash rewards largely to finance college educations, and, with their parents, strive to please their Aunt Gertrude, because she possesses a small fortune. The rich are portrayed as greedy and selfish. This view of the world reflects McFarlane's relative "lack [of] sympathy with the American power structure." In his autobiography, McFarlane described his rationale for writing the books this way, writing: "I had my own thoughts about teaching youngsters that obedience to authority is somehow sacred... Would civilization crumble if kids got the notion that the people who ran the world were sometimes stupid, occasionally wrong, and even corrupt at times?"


title: The Hardy Boys

text: It has been a matter of disagreement regarding the treatment of minorities in the books. The early volumes have been called models of diversity for their day, since among the Hardys' friends are Phil Cohen, who is Jewish, and the Italian immigrant Tony Prito. These two friends are rarely involved in the Hardys' adventures, however. That level of friendship is reserved for Biff Hooper and Chet Morton. The books have been extensively criticized for their use of racial and ethnic stereotypes and their xenophobia. Vilnoff, for example, the villain in "The Sinister Sign-Post" (1936), is described as "swarthy" and "a foreigner", notes critic Steve Burgess.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: We sense his untrustworthy nature immediately when he sits down beside the boys at a football game and doesn't understand it, despite the boys' best efforts to explain. When he does grasp something, you know it. "I onnerstand pairfectly," he says. Later he adds genially, "I haf you vhere I vant you now!" Can't quite place the accent? It's foreign. Twenty-five chapters are not enough to solve the mystery of his nationality.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: African Americans are the targets of much racism, being depicted as unintelligent, lazy, and superstitious, "bumpkin rescuers" at best and "secretive and conspiratorial villains" at worst. Benjamin Lefebvre notes that Harriet Adams at times rebuked Leslie McFarlane for not sufficiently following her instructions regarding the portrayal of African-American characters; he writes that it is not clear "whether Adams rewrote parts of McFarlane's manuscripts to add [racist] details or to what extent these early texts would now be considered even more notoriously racist had McFarlane followed Adams's instructions more carefully." In "Footprints Under the Window" (1933), Chinese-American men are portrayed as effeminate threats both to national security and white heteromasculinity. Native Americans received mixed treatment; those living within the continental United States are portrayed as members of once-noble tribes whose greatness has been diminished by the coming of white men, while those living outside the continental U.S. are "portrayed as uneducated, easily manipulated, or semi-savage." However, Hispanics are generally treated as equals; Mexico's history and culture are treated with respect and admiration.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: The "Hardy Boys" volumes were extensively revised beginning in 1959 at the insistence of publishers Grosset & Dunlap, and against the wishes of Harriet Adams. The revision project, which also encompassed the "Nancy Drew Mystery Stories", was sparked largely by letters that parents had been writing to Grosset & Dunlap since at least 1948, complaining about the prevalence of racial stereotypes in the books. Volume 14 in the "Hardy Boys" series, "The Hidden Harbor Mystery" (1935), was singled out for particular and repeated attention for its portrayal of a black criminal who organizes a gang of black boys and treats whites disrespectfully. As one parent put it, the books were "ingraining the old race-riot type of fear." As such letters became more frequent, Grosset & Dunlap informed the Stratemeyer Syndicate that the books must be revised and such stereotypes excised. The end result, however, was less the removal of stereotypes than the removal of non-white characters altogether and the creation of an "ethnically cleansed Bayport." By the 1970s, however, the series began to re-introduce black characters.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: An additional rationale for the revisions was a drop in sales, which became particularly significant by the mid-1960s. Accordingly, the revisions focused on streamlining the texts, as well as eliminating stereotypes. The books were shortened from 25 chapters to 20 and the writing style was made terser. Difficult words such as "ostensible" and "presaged" were eliminated, as was slang. As a result of the new, more streamlined writing style, the books focus more on non-stop action than on building atmosphere, and "prolonged suspense [is] evaporated." The books were also aimed at an increasingly younger audience with shorter attention spans. For this reason, many commentators find the new versions nothing less than "eviscerated", foremost among them being the first "Hardy Boys" ghostwriter, Leslie McFarlane, who agreed with a reporter's statement that the books had been "gutted."


title: The Hardy Boys

text: In the course of revising and modernizing the series, many plots were completely re-written. "The Flickering Torch Mystery" (1943), for example, was changed from a plot involving an actual flickering torch used as a signal by a gang to a plot featuring a rock club called "The Flickering Torch." When plots were kept, their more lurid elements were eliminated; Vilnoff, the villain in "The Sinister Sign-Post", was changed from a criminal who compulsively sculpts miniature models of his own hands to a car thief without such eccentricities, and another villain, Pedro Vincenzo, who branded his victims no longer does so in the revised version of "The Mark on the Door" (1934, rev. 1967).


title: The Hardy Boys

text: The books became more respectful of law and authority. Even villains no longer smoked or drank, and scenes involving guns and shoot-outs were compressed or eliminated, in favor of criminals simply giving themselves up. The boys, too, become more respectful of rules and of the law; for example, they no longer drive faster than the speed limit even in pursuit of a villain. The Hardys also became more and more wealthy, prompting the criticism that the "major problem in [these volumes] is that the Hardy Boys have risen above any ability to identify with people like the typical boys who read their books. They are members and agents of the adult ruling class, acting on behalf of that ruling class."


title: The Hardy Boys

text: The "Hardy Boys" began to be published in paperback in 1979. The Hardys were also featured in two new series, the "Hardy Boys Casefiles" and the "Clues Brothers". The latter series, modeled on the "Nancy Drew Notebooks", was aimed at a younger audience, and ran from 1997 to 2000. In contrast, the "Casefiles", begun a decade earlier in 1987, was aimed at an older audience than the "Hardy Boys Mystery Stories". In the new series, the Hardys work with a secret government organization simply called the "Network", with which they collaborate to "infiltrate organized crime, battle terrorists and track down assassins around the world." The Hardys' personalities are portrayed as more separate and distinct, and they sometimes fight; in the first of the series, "Dead on Target", for example, the brothers brawl after Frank tries to restrain Joe after Joe's girlfriend, Iola Morton, is killed by a car bomb. In general, the series is more violent, and the Hardy Boys carry various guns; Lines like "Joe! Hand me the Uzi!" are not out of character. Barbara Steiner, a Casefiles ghostwriter, describes a sample plot outline: "I was told that Joe Hardy would get involved with a waitress, a black widow kind of character, and that Joe would get arrested for murder. I was told the emphasis was on high action and suspense and there had to be a cliff-hanger ending to every chapter."


title: The Hardy Boys

text: The long-running "Hardy Boys Mystery Stories" series ended in 2005 and was replaced with a reboot series, "The Hardy Boys: Undercover Brothers". In these volumes, the Hardys' adventures are narrated in the first person, each brother alternating chapters. This fresh approach to telling the adventures reveals two boys quite foreign to how they have been portrayed before, egotistical and jealous, and longtime readers will find few connections with the boys' previous personalities. The boys' Aunt Gertrude becomes "Trudy", their mother Laura is given a career as a librarian, and their father is semi-retired. The boys are given their cases by a secret group known as ATAC, an acronym for American Teens Against Crime. In this new series, the Hardy Boys seem "more like regular kids – who have "lots" of wild adventures – in these books, which also deal with issues that kids today might have thought about. For example, the second book in the series, "Running on Fumes", deals with environmentalists who go a little too far to try to save trees." The Hardys are also featured in a new graphic novel series, begun in 2005 and produced by Papercutz, and a new early chapter book series called "The Hardy Boys: Secret Files", begun in 2010 by the publisher Simon & Schuster under their Aladdin imprint. The last "Undercover Brothers" books were released in January 2012 (main series) and July 2012 ("Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys Super Mystery '07" series). At the time of cancellation, there was one book that had been announced, but was ultimately shelved ("The Case Of The MyFace Kidnapper"); it is unknown whether this was going to be the final title of this unpublished book, since many bookstore websites and Simon & Schuster's website always had the letters "W.T." behind the title, meaning that it was a "working title".


title: The Hardy Boys

text: February 2013 saw the launch of "The Hardy Boys Adventures", a series written in the first person. For the first time since 1985, the books are issued in hardcover, along with paperback editions.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: The longest-running series of books to feature the Hardy Boys is the "Hardy Boys Mystery Stories", sometimes also called the "Hardy Boys Mysteries". The series ran from 1927 to 2005 and comprises 190 volumes, although some consider only the first 58 volumes of this series to be part of the Hardy Boys "canon." The Hardy Boys also appeared in 127 volumes of the "Casefiles" series and 39 volumes of the "Undercover Brothers" series, and are currently the heroes of the "Hardy Boys Adventures" series. The brothers were also featured in a few standalone books, such as "The Hardy Boys Ghost Stories", and some crossover titles where they teamed up with other characters such as Nancy Drew or Tom Swift.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: "Hardy Boys" books have been extensively reprinted in the United Kingdom, with new illustrations and cover art. The Hardys' adventures have also been translated into over twenty-five languages, including Afrikaans, Norwegian, Swedish, Spanish, Icelandic, Hebrew, French, German, Japanese, Russian, Malay, and Italian. The books are widely read in India, and Japan's Kyoto Sangyo University listed twenty-one "Hardy Boys" books on its reading list for freshmen in the 1990s.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: In the late 1950s, Disney contracted with the Stratemeyer Syndicate and Grosset & Dunlap to produce two "Hardy Boys" TV serials, starring Tim Considine and Tommy Kirk. The first of the serials, "The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure", was aired on "The Mickey Mouse Club" in 1956 during the show's second season. To appeal to the show's audience, the Hardy Boys were portrayed as younger than in the books, seeming to be 12 or 13 years old (Considine was 15 and Kirk was 14 during filming). The script, written by Jackson Gillis, was based on the first "Hardy Boys" book, "The Tower Treasure", and the serial was aired in 19 episodes of 15 minutes each with production costs of $5,700. A second serial, "The Mystery of Ghost Farm", followed in 1957, with an original story by Jackson Gillis. However, for unknown reasons, no more serials were produced.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: In the mid-1960s, sales of "Hardy Boys" books began to drop. The Stratemeyer Syndicate conducted a survey, which revealed that the decline in sales was due to the perceived high cost of the books and to competition from television. As a result, the Syndicate approved an hour-long pilot for a new Hardy Boys television show. The pilot, based on "The Mystery of the Chinese Junk", was aired on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) on September 8, 1967, and starred Tim Matthieson (later Matheson) as Joe Hardy and Rick Gates as Frank. Both actors were 20 at the time of production and portrayed the Hardy Boys as young adults rather than children. The show did poorly, however, and the series was abandoned. It is said to be the most faithful adaption.


title: The Hardy Boys

text: Two years later, in 1969, the American Broadcasting Company aired a Saturday morning cartoon series based on the "Hardy Boys"; the series was produced by Filmation and ran from 1969 to 1971. In this series, the Hardys were members of a rock and roll band. A group of professional musicians performed all the songs on the series and toured across the United States. The animated series produced two bubblegum music albums "of moderate quality with no commercial success." The series was notable for being the first cartoon to include a black character. The show took note of current concerns; although aimed at a young audience, some plot lines dealt with illegal drugs, and the animated Frank and Joe spoke directly to children about not smoking and the importance of wearing seat belts.