An Eccles cake is a small, round cake filled with currants and made from flaky pastry with butter, which is sometimes topped with demerara sugar.

Eccles cakes are named after the English town of Eccles. It is not known who invented the recipe, but James Birch is credited with being the first person to sell Eccles cakes on a commercial basis, which he sold from his shop at the corner of Vicarage Road and St Mary’s Road (now known as Church Street) in the town centre, in 1793.

Nicknames for the Eccles cake include Squashed Fly Cake, Fly Cake, Fly Pie or even a Fly's Graveyard, owing to the appearance of the currants that it contains. Eccles cakes do not currently have Protected Geographical Status, so may be manufactured anywhere and still labelled as "Eccles" cakes.

The Garibaldi biscuit shares many common ingredients with the Eccles Cake but is smaller and a dry product rather than a moist cake.

The Chorley cake (from the town of Chorley in Lancashire) is flatter in appearance, is made with shortcrust pastry rather than flaky pastry and is devoid of sugar topping.

Lee Stephen Mead (born 14 July 1981) is an English musical theatre actor, best known for winning the title role in the 2007 West End revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat through the BBC reality TV casting show Any Dream Will Do. As well as subsequent roles in Wicked and Legally Blonde: The Musical, Mead is pursuing a music career with his third album, 'Love Songs', released in February 2012.

After studying at performing arts college, Mead gained his first professional stage experience in cabaret as a cruise ship singer on the Portsmouth to Bilbao ferry and then in a summer season at Bridlington Spa Theatre. He moved into musical theatre in 2004, playing both Levi and the Pharaoh in the UK touring production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Following Joseph, Mead performed in the UK tours of Tommy (ensemble and first cover Tommy) and Miss Saigon (ensemble and first cover Chris) before joining the West End production of Phantom of the Opera as an ensemble player and understudy for the role of Raoul.

Martin Booth (7 September 1944 – 12 February 2004) was a prolific British novelist and poet. He also worked as a teacher and screenwriter, and was the founder of the Sceptre Press.

Booth was born in Lancashire, but was brought up mainly in Hong Kong, where he first attended Kowloon Junior School, the Peak School then King George V School, and left in 1964.

He made his name as a poet and as a publisher, producing elegant volumes by British and American poets, including slim volumes of work by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. His own books of verse include The Knotting Sequence (1977), named for the village in which Booth was living at the time. The book features a series of lyrics in which he seeks links between the present and the Saxon past, and the man called Knot who gave his name to the village. Booth also accumulated a library of contemporary verse, which allowed him to produce anthologies and lectures.

In the late 1970s Booth turned mainly to writing fiction. His first successful novel, Hiroshima Joe, was published in 1985. The book is based on what he heard from a man he met as a boy in Hong Kong and contains passages set in that city during the Second World War.