Kempston in 1908The Urban District was based on East End, Up End and Kempston New Town all of which are in the north eastern part of the parish close to Bedford, and had 86. 8 % of the total population at the 1901 census.

For borough election purposes the town is divided into three wards called Kempston North, Kempston East and Kempston South.

Note 2: The 2001 Kempston Urban figure is the combined total for the three urban wards of Kempston East, Kempston North and Kempston South.

* Brickhill, Castle, Cauldwell, De Parys, Goldington, Harpur, Kempston East, Kempston North, Kempston South, Kingsbrook, Newnham, Putnoe, Queens Park.

The modern Kempston West Methodist Church now stands on the site.

Church End, with its original parish church, remains a small hamlet in the rural part of Kempston.

For many centuries, All Saints ' Church in Church End, which was first Catholic and later Anglican, was the only place of worship in Kempston.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was first introduced in Bedford and Kempston by a missionary called Willard Richards on the 1st August 1837.

Church End Lower School serves Kempston Rural.

Apart from All Saints ' Church, the best-known historic buildings are the King William IV pub and Kempston Barracks.

The road cuts through Kempston Rural, crossing the Great Ouse between the urban area and Church End.

The Bedford Urban Area which includes Kempston, Elstow and Biddenham forms the 71st largest Urban Area in the UK with a population of 101, 928.

The river is navigable from the Wash to Kempston Mill, which is just beyond Bedford, a distance of.

42 ( Grant Palmer ) provides an hourly daytime service Mondays to Saturdays providing a connection to: Weston, Harlington, Toddington, Ampthill, Houghton Conquest, Kempston and Bedford.

J2 ( Stagecoach ) provides an hourly daytime service Mondays to Saturdays to Ampthill, Houghton Conquest, Kempston and Bedford.

Kempston serves principally as a dormitory town for Bedford and for Milton Keynes, which is about ten miles away.

In 1870 developers began to attempt to develop land on the road from Kempston to Bedford under the name " Kempston New Town ".

In 1974 Kempston Urban District was abolished and Kempston reverted to being a civil parish, in the Borough of Bedford but with a separate town council with minor powers.

Kempston abuts both John Bunyan's home parish of Elstow and Bedford, where he was imprisoned.

The Bedford church now known as the Bunyan Meeting had members in Kempston from at least 1657, and ministers from the church sometimes preached in private houses in Kempston.

Up until the Second World War Roman Catholics who lived in Kempston were obliged to worship at a church in Bedford.

The first resident Catholic priest in Kempston was appointed in 1965 and the present small and plain Catholic church in Bedford Road was built at around this time.

The Bedford Southern Bypass on the A421, was constructed in the 1990s and links with the Kempston relief road, built in the 1980s.

Patrick Hall ( born 20 October 1951 ) is a British Labour Party politician, who was the Member of Parliament ( MP ) for Bedford and Kempston from 1997 to 2010.

He was elected to the House of Commons at the 1997 General Election for the new seat of Bedford and Kempston with a majority of 8, 300.

BBC Three Counties Radio broadcasts on 90. 4FM ( Epping Green, near Hertford ), 92. 1FM ( Bedmond, near Hemel Hempstead ), 94. 7FM ( Quainton Hill, near Aylesbury ), 95. 5FM ( Sandy Heath ), 98. 0FM ( High Wycombe ), 103. 8FM ( Zouches Farm, near Luton ), 104. 5FM ( Bow Brickhill, near Milton Keynes ), 630kHz MW ( Lewsey Farm, near Luton ), 1161kHz ( Kempston, near Bedford ), and streaming from the BBC 3CR website.

The burgeoning population of Kempston New Town was served by St Stephen's, a temporary iron church in Spring Road which was built in 1888.

Sessions was born in Largs, and spent some of his earliest years in Kempston, Bedfordshire and St Albans, Hertfordshire.

Until the 19th century Kempston was a mainly rural parish.

Construction was slow at first, but the new district soon began to expand steadily and Kempston acquired a more urban feel.

In 1896 the parish was divided into Kempston Urban District 1, 255 acres ( 5. 1 km² ) and the civil parish of Kempston Rural 3, 770 acres ( 15 km² ).

Kempston Rural was three times larger, but remained sparsely populated.

Kempston was recorded as " camestone " in the Domesday Book and had a 6th-century Anglo Saxon burial site, now home to the Saxon Centre.

The first Congregationalist church building in Kempston was opened in the High Street in 1813.

A replacement church was built in Kempston New town in 1871.

The plot was previously the location of the Kempston Liberal Club.

Grange House was later donated by the Kempston branch of the Howard family to the people of Kempston.

There is an out-of-town shopping centre called Kempston Interchange Retail Park alongside it, and Asda, Argos and Woolworths distribution centres have opened at the Kempston end of it since the turn of the millennium.

In December 2010 work finished on construction of a new stretch of the A421 from Kempston to Junction 13 of the M1 motorway, this now provides a full dual carriageway link road between the A1 and the M1.

The new constituency ( strictly speaking The Bedford division of Bedfordshire ) covered the northern end of the county and included Kempston and Eaton Socon together with the surrounding rural area.

The better known of these included the Kempston joystick interface, the Morex Peripherals Centronics / RS-232 interface, the Currah Microspeech unit ( speech synthesis ), Videoface Digitiser, RAM pack, the Cheetah Marketing SpecDrum, a drum machine, and the Multiface, a snapshot and disassembly tool from Romantic Robot.

file: Kempston joystick interface. jpeg | Kempston joystick interface

There were numerous disk drive interfaces, including the Abbeydale Designers / Watford Electronics SPDOS, Abbeydale Designers / Kempston KDOS and Opus Discovery.

From Milton Keynes, the canal is planned to pass beneath the M1 utilising an existing cattle creep, then cross over Brogborough Hill, and across the Marston Vale through to the River Great Ouse in Kempston.

According to the former Bedfordshire County Council's estimates, the town had a population of 80, 000 in mid 2005, with 19, 720 in the adjacent town of Kempston.

The controller uses the prevailing de facto standard Atari-style 9-pin connector and can be connected without modification to all other machines compatible with that standard, including the Atari 2600, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum with Kempston interface or similar.

It flows through Brackley, Buckingham, Milton Keynes at Stony Stratford, Newport Pagnell, Olney and Kempston, which is the current head of navigation.

It featured a Kempston joystick port, and later revisions contained a switch that effectively ' hid ' the device from software.

Kempston is a town and civil parish located in Bedfordshire, England.

Once known as the largest village in England, Kempston is now a town with its own town council.