The villages of Peterborough

Peterborough is often read as one place. It is closer to forty.

Only a fraction of the unitary authority is city. West and north-west, the ground rises onto Jurassic limestone: the quarries at Barnack cut the stone that built Peterborough Cathedral, Ely and Bury St Edmunds, and the villages up there are the colour of the rock beneath them. North, around Helpston and Glinton, are the fields John Clare wrote into English literature before enclosure rewrote them.

Through the middle runs the Nene. It carried Roman pottery out of Durobrivae, medieval stone down to the abbey and Victorian bricks off to London, and it still ties the whole area together — from the steam sheds at Wansford, through Ferry Meadows, to Stanground Lock where the fenland waterways begin. South of the river the Oxford Clay that fired Peterborough's brick industry now holds lakes and nature reserves. East, the land flattens, the soil turns black and the roads run dead straight across ground that was open water until the seventeenth century.

Twenty-seven are villages with their own parish councils, and one more — Pilsgate — is a hamlet inside a neighbouring parish. Four are townships — Bretton, Hampton, Werrington and, still rising out of the fields, Great Haddon — planned and built from scratch over the last sixty years. Eight are villages the growing city absorbed in the twentieth century, still legible in a church tower, a lane that bends the wrong way, or a name on a bus stop. One, Fengate and Northey, is not a village at all, but the oldest inhabited ground in the district.