Bolton

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Bolton is a large town in Greater Manchester in the North-West of England, 17 miles north of Manchester city centre. As well as Bolton itself, the borough includes several small towns, notably Blackrod, Farnworth, Heaton, Horwich, Little Lever and Westhoughton. Bolton grew rapidly as a textile and metal-bashing town during the 18th & 19th centuries. The Spinning Mule was invented here: it spun yarn into cotton thread faster and more efficiently than earlier processes, to feed the great hungry looms, and in its heyday there were 50 million Mules in Lancashire alone. A few were still in use for specialist fine yarns until the 1980s, but the Lancashire cotton trade collapsed from the 1950s, unable to compete with cheap imports. Bolton and similar towns slumped. In 1974 Manchester and its surrounding towns, including Bolton, were separated from Lancashire and became Greater Manchester. Bolton is nowadays mainly a commuter town for the big city. With a population of 128,000, Bolton may well be "the biggest town in Britain" but its bids to be recognised as a city itself continue to be rebuffed. The town's traditional dialect is more "Lanky" (Lancashire) than Mancunian. You're unlikely nowadays to hear "thee / tha / thi" for "you / your" unless ironically, but you might hear "owt" (anything), "nowt" (nothing), "summat" (something) and "reeght" (right). Thus, a trivial matter is dismissed as "summat 'n nowt." Residents of Westhoughton are dubbed Keawyeds - cow heads; there's a bovine legend about this but it's probably from their victory banquet after Waterloo in 1815, when they roasted an ox and paraded the skull as "Old Boney".