Once I asked a question on gis.stackexchange.com
which lead to a chunk of the UK academic production being lost for the day. But anyway we decided that we needed to vectorise
the font typeface.
This led me to think about how many towns (or county boroughs) we actually needed to get all the letters of the alphabet, this code answers the question - 6. 'Newcastle upon Tyne', 'Wolverhampton', 'Kingston upon Hull', 'West Bromwich', 'Merthyr Tydfil', 'Halifax' Provided that you don't care about J, Q & Z!
With some more thought I've improved the code and the answer is now 5 towns: 'Newcastle upon Tyne', 'Edinburgh', 'Halifax', 'Wolverhampton', 'Birkenhead'