page_title: St Neots
section_title: Geography
hierarchical_section_title: St Neots / Geography
caption_attribution_description: English: The River Ouse, St Neots
context_page_description: St Neots is a town and civil parish in the Huntingdonshire District of the county of Cambridgeshire, England, approximately 50 miles north of central London. The town straddles the River Great Ouse and is served by a railway station on the East Coast Main Line. It is 14 miles west of Cambridge, to which it is linked by the A428 arterial road. It is the largest town in Cambridgeshire and had a population of 30,811 in the 2011 census.
  The town is named after the Cornish monk Saint Neot, whose bones were moved to the Priory here from the hamlet of St Neot on Bodmin Moor in around 980 AD. Pilgrimage to the priory church and parish church brought prosperity to the settlement and the town was granted a market charter in 1130. In the 18th and 19th centuries the town enjoyed further prosperity through corn milling, brewing, stagecoach traffic and railways.
  After the Second World War the town and its industry were chosen for rapid growth as London councils paid for new housing to be built to rehouse families from London.
context_section_description: St Neots is just over 49 miles north of Charing Cross, London. It is close to the south-western boundary of Huntingdonshire District, and both the city of Cambridge and the county town of Bedford are nearby.
  St Neots lies in the valley of the River Great Ouse, partly on the flood plain and partly on slightly higher ground a little further from the water. The Great Ouse is a mature river, once wide and shallow but now controlled by weirs and sluices and usually constrained in a well-defined channel.
  Tributaries entering the Great Ouse in the town are the River Kym, Hen Brook, Duloe Brook and Colmworth Brook. The area is generally low-lying. Riverside Fields, an amenity adjacent to St Neots Bridge, remains set aside as a flood-meadow, subject to flood, protecting dwellings and commercial property from a swollen reach.
  St Neots developed at the site of a ford where overland routes converged. This was replaced by a medieval bridge, and today there are two further crossings just outside the town, one to the north and another to the south.
  The soil is mainly light, overlying gravel beds – gravel extraction is a local industry. Older disused gravel pits, such as the nearby Paxton Pits and Wyboston Leisure Park, have been converted to nature reserves and amenity areas. Away from the river, the higher land is mainly a heavy clay soil with few large settlements. Much of the land is used for arable farming.
caption: River Great Ouse, St Neots
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