MARCH 10TH, 2010
By ADMIN
Approximate Population: 136,082
Stockport is a large town in Greater Manchester, England. It lies on elevated ground on the River Mersey at the influx of the rivers Goyt and Tame, 6.1 miles (9.8 km) southeast of the city of Manchester. Stockport is the largest settlement of the Metropolitan Borough of Stockport, and has a population of 136,082, the wider borough being 281,000.
Stockport in the 16th century was known for the cultivation of hemp and rope manufacture and in the 18th century the town had one of the first mechanised silk factories in the United Kingdom. However, Stockport’s predominant industries of the 19th century were the cotton and allied industries. Stockport was also at the centre of the country’s hatting industry which by 1884 was exporting more than six million hats a year. In December 1997 the last Stockport hat works closed. The town’s hatting heritage is preserved at ‘Hat Works - the Museum of Hatting’.
Dominating the western approaches to the town is the Stockport Viaduct. Built in 1840, the viaduct’s 27 brick arches over the River Mersey carry the mainline railways from Manchester to Birmingham and London. This structure featured as the background in many paintings by L.S. Lowry.
The Municipal Corporations Act 1835 made Stockport a municipal borough divided into six wards with a council consisting of 14 Aldermen and 42 Councillors. In 1888, its status was raised to County Borough, becoming the County Borough of Stockport. Since 1972, Stockport has been twinned with in Béziers in France. In 1974, under the Local Government Act 1972 Stockport amalgamated with neighbouring districts to form the Unitary Authority of the Metropolitan Borough of Stockport in the now ceremonial metropolitan county of Greater Manchester.
Approximate Population: 80,000
Bath is a city in the ceremonial county of Somerset in the south west of England. It is situated 97 miles (156 km) west of London and 13 miles (21 km) south-east of Bristol. The population of the city is about 80,000. It was granted city status by Royal Charter by Queen Elizabeth I in 1590, and was made a county borough in 1889 which gave it administrative independence from its county, Somerset. The city became part of Avon when that county was created in 1974. Since 1996, when Avon was abolished, Bath has been the principal centre of the unitary authority of Bath and North East Somerset (B&NES).
Archaeological evidence shows that the site of the Roman Baths’ main spring was treated as a shrine by the Celts, and was dedicated to the goddess Sulis, whom the Romans identified with Minerva; however, the name Sulis continued to be used after the Roman invasion, leading to the town’s Roman name of Aquae Sulis (literally, “the waters of Sulis”).
Messages to her scratched onto metal, known as curse tablets, have been recovered from the Sacred Spring by archaeologists. These curse tablets were written in Latin, and usually laid curses on people by whom the writer felt they had been wronged. For example, if a citizen had his clothes stolen at the baths, he would write a curse, naming the suspects, on a tablet to be read by the Goddess Sulis Minerva.
The temple was constructed in 60–70 AD and the bathing complex was gradually built up over the next 300 years. During the Roman occupation of Britain, and possibly on the instructions of Emperor Claudius, engineers drove oak piles into the mud to provide a stable foundation and surrounded the spring with an irregular stone chamber lined with lead. In the 2nd century, the spring was enclosed within a wooden barrel-vaulted building, which housed the calidarium (hot bath), tepidarium (warm bath), and frigidarium (cold bath). The city was given defensive walls, probably in the 3rd century. After the Roman withdrawal in the first decade of the 5th century, the baths fell into disrepair and were eventually lost due to silting up.
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