History
Long Buckby has a history going back approximately 1,200 years to the Vikings when all of northern, central and eastern England came under Danelaw. The mound remaining of a castle built by Sahir de Quincy in the 12th century remains. The village name is of Nordic origin, with 'by' meaning settlement or village while 'Buck' is derived from 'Bec' (pronounced 'becker' in old Norse) for stream/brook. The village is recorded in the Domesday Book as Buchebei, its affix possibly coming at a later date in reference to the length of the village.
The village once had a thriving shoemaking industry but is now mainly a residential village. The village offers a wide range of amenities and services to its residents, including a doctor's surgery, two dentists, four churches, two schools, public library, a veterinary surgery, a boarding cattery, post office, a community centre and Long Buckby Mill Park Nature Reserve. There are three pubs in the village. Local shops include two grocery stores, a butcher, several hairdressers, a newsagent, card and gift shop, chemist, a hardware store, and a wide range of restaurants and take-aways.
The comedian Stanley Unwin moved to Long Buckby in 1940 when he got a job with the British Broadcasting Corporation at the nearby Borough Hill transmitting station. He stayed as a resident until his death in 2002.
Long Buckby station had a brief moment of fame in 1997 when, as the nearest stop to Althorp, it was the final stop on the journey by the Prince of Wales and his two sons during the funeral of the Princess of Wales, and was seen on television screens across the world as they got off the train. Prince Charles and his sons took a different route to Althorp using Brington Road as the rest of the Royal Family and guests drove through the village of Long Buckby leaving the village via East Street to follow the main road to Northampton which Althorp lies on.
In 2007, one of the village shops celebrated its 150th year of operation since it first opened on the High Street in 1858.
Until the mid 1960s Long Buckby boasted its own goods marshalling yard which played a very significant role in the once thriving village economy, providing for the import of fuel and consumables for local business and residents as well as delivering the mail and packages to the village post office, and newspapers to the village newsagents. Local agricultural produce and to a lesser extent livestock were exported from the facility.
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—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
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—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)