The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) also has three regional outposts at Beningbrough Hall, Bodelwyddan Castle and Montacute House.

It would still be more than half a decade before the pop music industry, based mainly in New York and Los Angeles, with scattered regional outposts, became a booming mass medium.

At the same time the West no longer dealt with Kenya as it had in the past, when it was viewed as a strategic regional outpost against communist influences from Ethiopia and Tanzania.

The city remained an underdeveloped regional outpost, with comparatively little of the classical Victorian architecture that characterized southern cities.

Exxon's regional outposts tend to report individually to its corporate headquarters in Irving, Tex.

The National Portrait Gallery also has three regional outposts.

Each of its new regional outposts - in Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles - is expected to be self-sustaining through local fund-raising, Ms. Mathis said.

Their immodest goal: grab enough new offices, factories and corporate headquarters to complete Atlanta's transformation from regional outpost to global business nexus.

While government buildings house the regional outposts of several ministries and organisations (their employees have regular salaries) the majority of the urban population run small businesses or are traders.

Sangelhos became a regional military outpost, whose territory included many of the local parishes of the modern municipalities of Anadia, Oliveira do Bairro and Águeda.