My Merry Midlands Moments
There were still two weeks to kill before I could move back into my accommodation at Oxford, and I spent them at the house of two friends in Hampton in Arden, a quaint village just outside Birmingham. Until writing this blog post, I often wondered but never bothered to find out what exactly an Arden is and why anyone would want to build a Hampton there. It turns out Arden was once a large forest in Warwickshire that gradually gave way to settlements like Birmingham, Coventry, and Stratford-upon-Avon. It is thought the word would have meant something like “highland” in Brythonic (meanwhile, the name “Hampton” derives from the very pedestrian words “home” and “town”).