History
The present town is originally a Roman settlement. In the Middle Ages there was a large castle here, owned by John of Gaunt, and a major medieval market. In 1835 Newcastle-under-Lyme Municipal Borough was one of the boroughs reformed by the Municipal Corporations Act 1835 which required that rate payers elected councillors. In 1932 it took in what had been the Wolstanton United Urban District, covering the parishes of Chesterton, Silverdale and Wolstanton, also taking the parish of Clayton from Newcastle-under-Lyme Rural District.
The district was formed on 1 April 1974, under the Local Government Act 1972, as a merger of the Newcastle-under-Lyme Municipal Borough, the Kidsgrove Urban District, and Newcastle-under-Lyme Rural District.
Up to the time of the passing of the Municipal Reform Act an election a mock mayor occurred annually after the election of the real mayor.
Read more about this topic: Borough Of Newcastle-under-Lyme
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)