Coventry stays for Northampton teams

Northampton is the county town of Northamptonshire and the administrative centre of West Northamptonshire, on the River Nene about 60 miles north-west of London. Its wider urban area had 249,093 people at the 2021 census, which makes it one of the largest towns in England.

In the Middle Ages Northampton Castle was an occasional royal residence that regularly hosted Parliament. Richard I granted the town a charter in 1189 and battles were fought here in 1264 and 1460. The town backed Parliament in the Civil War, so Charles II ordered its walls and most of the castle destroyed. The Great Fire of 1675 took much of what was left.

Rebuilt, it grew with the Grand Union Canal and the railways into a centre of footwear and leather manufacture. Specialist shoemakers such as Church's, Crockett & Jones, Edward Green and Tricker's survive and many of the old shoe factories have become offices or homes.

Its main private employers now work in distribution and finance, among them Barclaycard, Nationwide Building Society, Travis Perkins and Carlsberg, whose Northampton brewery opened in 1974 as the first outside Denmark. The University of Northampton moved to a £330 million waterside campus by the Nene in 2018.

The town is served by junctions 15, 15a and 16 of the M1 and its station sits on the Northampton Loop of the West Coast Main Line. Humber Hub, in Lower Stoke on the south-east side of Coventry, is about 32 miles by road and Sullivan Heights about 35 miles, a base for teams whose work spreads across the Midlands.