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St. Neots has been, since 1974, a town and civil parish in the non-metropolitan county of Cambridgeshire, England, within the historic county of Huntingdonshire, next to the Bedfordshire county border. It lies on the banks of the River Great Ouse in the Huntingdonshire District, 15 miles (24 km) west of Cambridge and 50 miles (80 km) north of central London. St Neots is the second largest urban centre in Cambridgeshire (the largest being Cambridge) with a population of approximately 40,000 in 2014.
There were two mergers of counties in 1965 and 1974 which brought Huntingdonshire into Cambridgeshire. St. Neots was an urban district from 1894 to 1974 and, during most of the 19th century, a Registration District and Poor Law Union.
Although Roman and even pre-Roman finds have been made in and around St. Neots, there was no significant settlement until Saxon times. Early developments were in Eynesbury (in an area close to the centre of St. Neots), Eaton Socon and Eaton Ford (the latter two originally in Bedfordshire), which still exist as part of the town today; and also in Maltman's Green and Crosshall Ford which are no longer recognised.
The town is named after the Cornish monk Saint Neot whose bones were stolen from the village of St. Neot on Bodmin Moor and concealed in Hinchinbrooke priory close to what is now St. Neots, Huntingdonshire. Pilgrimage to St. Neots brought prosperity for the town, and it was granted a market charter in 1130. The Normans rebuilt the priory near the river and the town of St. Neots grew up against its southern wall.
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 grew rapidly as London councils paid for new housing to be built in the town to rehouse families from London. The first London overspill housing was completed in the early 1960s. .
For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article History of St. Neots.
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