Things you didn't know about... Blackburn

King James I, on his way back to London from Scotland in 1617, stayed at Hoghton Tower near Blackburn where, legend has it, he knighted a loin of beef with the words, "Arise, Sir Loin".

Blackburn Rovers Football Club, founded in 1875, originally had green and white quarters on their jerseys, but the green was replaced with light blue after pressure from the Cambridge-educated members of the club.

Hoghton Tower, north of Blackburn, is where a young William Shakespeare worked in the late 1500s as a tutor during his so-called "lost years"—the period of his life about which very little is known.

Kathleen Ferrier, Britain's most famous opera singer, was born in 1912 in Blackburn, and worked there in her teens as a telephone operator because her family couldn't afford to send her to school. But after winning a singing competition in Carlisle, her career took off.

Blackburn Museum houses arguably the finest collection of Greek and Russian icons in the UK outside the British Museum. The majority of the works come from Thomas Boys Lewis, a Blackburn cotton manufacturer.

James Hargreaves, inventor of the Spinning Jenny in 1764, was born near Blackburn on a farm on the moors above Oswaldtwistle, although the precise location is unknown. He died in relative poverty in 1778, having failed to patent his device.

In the Beatles' song, A Day in the Life, John Lennon sings: "I read the news today, Oh boy / Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire...". Apparently he had seen an article in the Daily Mail about a plan to fill all the potholes in the city's roads.

In the 1945 general election, which Labour won by a landslide, Barbara Castle joined the government as MP for Blackburn. The trail-blazing female MP was responsible for, among other things, the introduction of child benefit.