I was once travelling around north Wales, when I met an young Australian man. I asked him where he had come from and where he was going next. He'd flown to Switzerland or somewhere like that, travelled through Europe, arrived in London, got on a coach for North Wales for a spot of rock climbing and fallen asleep. All he remembered of the coach trip across England was waking up briefly, looking out of the window and seeing the placename 'Southam' as he passed through.
Being on the (1) Welsh drover's road to the London markets, (2) the Southampton-Oxford-Banbury-Coventry-Birmingham road, (3) the Stratford-Warwick-Daventry-Northampton road, and (4) being a market town, Southam has been a place to pass through or use as a stop-over for many centuries, but it never become a major centre. In spite of being granted town status in the thirteenth century, it just couldn't compete with its neighbours - Coventry, Daventry, Banbury, Warwick. It has no castle, seat of county government, major market, navigable river, canal access, railway or even bus station. In the era of the stagecoach, the town must have been a welcome break on those rattly long journeys, but it was a service and dormitory town even then, a place to pass through, not a final destination.
Some famous passers through:
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| Daniel Defoe - cantered through the town, leaving a brief description, on his tour of England, calling it, "a considerable market town ... which subsists chiefly by the great concourse of travellers". |
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| Oliver Cromwell - stayed here with his troops during the Civil War |
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| Charles I - also stopped here with troops when romping around the country during the Civil War |
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| William Shakespeare - well, not really, but he was kind enough to mention Southam in one of his plays as a place which someone passed through on the way to somewhere else. |
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| Justin Welby - now Archbishop of Canterbury, was rector of Southam for a little while. |
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