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South Midlands

BedfordshireBuckinghamshireNorthamptonshireRegions of EnglandUse British English from August 2015

The South Midlands is an area of England which includes Northamptonshire, the northern parts of Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire and the western part of Bedfordshire. Unlike the East Midlands or West Midlands, the South Midlands is not one of the NUTS statistical regions of the United Kingdom.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article South Midlands (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors).

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Latitude Longitude
N 52.1 ° E -0.8 °
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Hanslope


, Hanslope
England, United Kingdom
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Foreign and Commonwealth Office Migrated Archives

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office Migrated Archives are a collection of about 20,000 files and other records created by the governments of 37 British colonial dependencies, removed to the UK at independence, and held clandestinely for decades in various repositories in and around London. They came only from territories administered by the Colonial Office, so not from India and other dependencies administered by the India Office and its predecessors, whose records are in the India Office Records at the British Library. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) was finally forced to admit the existence of the 'migrated archives' in 2011 during the course of the 'Mau Mau litigation', a case brought against the British government by veterans of the 1952–1960 struggle for independence in Kenya who claimed compensation for ill-treatment and torture. Foreign Secretary William Hague announced in the House of Commons on 5 May 2011 that he intended "to release every part of every paper of interest subject only to legal exemptions". The collection was transferred to the UK National Archives (TNA), and opened to the public, during 2012 and 2013. It is held at TNA under the reference FCO 141. There are redactions and closed and retained items, but it appears that nothing was destroyed during the process of transfer. Unknown quantities of related material were destroyed by the British authorities in the former dependencies during the decolonisation period. It is not known if anything was destroyed after the removal to the UK. Certainly some was lost during the many moves from one building to another. Because of the circumstances of the release of these records it was initially believed that the entire content was sensitive and potentially incriminating. In fact, content is highly miscellaneous and sometimes mundane. FCO 141 also includes files created by the FCO, TNA, and their predecessors which are about the 'migrated archives' rather than part of them. Material in FCO 141 covers dates between 1835 and 2012.

Haversham
Haversham

Haversham is a village and former civil parish, now in the parish of Haversham-cum-Little Linford, in the City of Milton Keynes unitary authority area, in Buckinghamshire, England. It is situated to the north of (and separated by the River Great Ouse from) the Milton Keynes urban area, near Wolverton and about 5 miles (8 km) north of Central Milton Keynes. The village name is an Old English word that means 'Haefer's homestead'. In the Domesday Book of 1086, when it belonged to the Peverell family, it was listed as Havresham. The ancient manor house in the village, which was fortified in 1304, was largely burnt down, but parts of it still remain in a farm house just outside the main village. Haversham was once a village of farm-workers' dwellings. As of 2012, only Hill Farm, Grange Farm and Crossroads Farm remain as active working farms. The village has two distinct settlements separated by farmland. The older part of the village contains the manor house. It lies at elevations between 60 metres and 65 metres above mean sea level, just above the flood plain of the Ouse. In the 1930s, 'New Haversham' was built nearer Wolverton, to house staff working at the Wolverton railway works nearby. New Haversham contains the primary school and is on ground at elevations between 65 metres and 75 metres, overlooking the Ouse Valley. In the 1970s, ARC dug the river meadows near the site of the old village of Stanton Low for gravel extraction, leaving behind the large man made lakes that surround Haversham to the south today. These lakes are the home to the Hanson Centre and to the Haversham Sailing Club, one of the sailing clubs around Milton Keynes. Just south of Haversham beside the road to Wolverton, is the Wolverton Railway Viaduct over the valley of the river Great Ouse, of a Stephenson's design, carrying the West Coast Main Line. The village gave its name to HMS Haversham, a Ham class minesweeper.