Luton's football club is still called the Hatters for a vanished trade
Luton Town fans still go by the Hatters, a nod to the straw hats that made the Bedfordshire town famous. The trade took root in the 17th century, after a band of Scots sheltered by Sir John Napier, owner of the Luton Hoo estate, introduced straw plaiting, and it peaked in the 1930s before fading after the Second World War.
Anglo-Saxons founded the town on the River Lea in the 6th century, and an 8th-century record calls it Lygetun, the town on the Lea. Domesday lists it as Loitone and Lintone, a farming place of perhaps 700 to 800 people. Robert, 1st Earl of Gloucester, began St Mary's Church in 1121 and finished it by 1137, while a castle built in 1139 was gone by 1154, leaving only its name on Castle Street.
Hats powered rapid growth: 3,095 residents in 1801 became almost 39,000 by 1901. The coat of arms granted in 1876 still tells the story, with a wheatsheaf for straw and a beehive for plaiting. Cars took over from hats once Vauxhall set up what became Britain's largest car plant, which built Churchill tanks in the Second World War and drew Luftwaffe raids despite heavy camouflage. The work attracted large Irish and Pakistani communities. Car assembly stopped in 2002, and van production followed in 2025.
An odd episode came in 1919, when ex-servicemen angry about unemployment and refused a park for their Peace Day celebrations stormed the town hall and set it ablaze. Decades later the botanist John Dony told his students he had smashed its last intact window. A new hall opened in 1936.
Today the borough, about 50 kilometres north-west of London, counted 225,262 people in 2021 and has run itself as a unitary authority since 1997. London Luton Airport, opened by the council in 1938, is a major employer. The town hosts what is billed as Europe's largest one-day carnival, and its football club, which won the League Cup in 1988, has played at Kenilworth Road since 1905.
Source: Luton
