Talk about your out-of-the-blue question!. So I was wondering if the English county of Lancaster had any connection with the Bomber of the same name?
That’s where they built them!
There isn’t an English county called Lancaster. It’s Lancashire, with Lancaster being the county’s principal town.
And it’s not where they were built; they were, in fact, built in a variety of places by at least five different companies in two countries.
It evolved from the Manchester bomber, and both were designed and primarily built by Avro, a Manchester-based firm…and then, Manchester was in Lancashire.
In addition to the Lancaster and the earlier Manchester, Avro also made the Lincoln, there was also the Short Stirling and Sunderland, plus the Handley-Page Halifax and Hampden. City names were pretty common.
In a similar vein, Hawker’s fighters were the Hurricane, Typhoon, Tempest and the Fury
I know Lancaster isn’t a county, at least I should know because I’ve been there many times, and the don’t name train stations for the county they are in, but I still consistently and conveniently ‘forget’ these facts.
BTW I think the principal town of Lancashire is Preston, not Lancaster.
I grew up thinking Lancaster was the county above Lancashire. I grew up in Lancashire which makes it all the more odd that I thought that. Was it ever a county or did I just get stuck with an odd misunderstanding?
By the way I got an ‘E’ in my Geography GCSE so no surprises there.
I think folks from Manchester might disagree with that 
The county originated in the 1100s. There’s plenty of misidentifications as ‘county of Lancaster’, but they’re wrong, often with a Victorian pomposity. You’re right that Preston is now the administrative centre…but you forgot to call it a ‘city’. ahem 
Manchester is the principal town of Greater-Manchester.
Somebody ‘staring blankly at their GPS’ might well be puzzled, because Manchester’s been separate from Lancashire for several decades
Right. And the same goes for the city of Manchester. But details details, the point was still the same.
I think trying to be clever is a habit best left to clever people.
Btw, talking of clever people. GorillaMan is there any UK trivia you aren’t an expert on?? Or are you just a particularly talented googler?
Heh heh. Both.
(Hey, we’re both posting at 1am, so neither of us have anything to boast about 
)
There was also a bomber called the Whitley. This was named after the suburb of Coventry where the builder, Armstrong Whitworth, had one of its factories. Another AW factory was at nearby Baginton, which is now Coventry Airport.
It was the convention at the time to name bombers after cities. When the RAF needed aircraft capable of delivering nuclear bombs in the early 1950s, they bought B29s from the US and called them the Washington.