Lubbock, Texas map

Lubbock sits in the middle of the South Plains, 122 miles south of Amarillo on I-27 and about 320 miles northwest of Fort Worth. It is roughly equidistant from Midland to the south and the New Mexico line to the west. The city is the seat of Lubbock County, which was organized in 1891, a year after the town was created by merging the rival settlements of Old Lubbock and Monterey. Both county and city are named for Thomas S. Lubbock, a Texas Ranger and Confederate officer.

The only real relief in the city is Yellow House Canyon, cut by the North Fork of the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River, which runs southeast through Mackenzie Park and out past Buffalo Springs Lake. Everywhere else the drainage collects in playa lakes — shallow round basins that hold water after storms and are now the centers of city parks. Because the terrain gives no cues, Lubbock's grid does the navigating: numbered streets run east–west and rise as you go south, and named or numbered avenues run north–south.

Texas Tech University was chartered in 1923 and opened northwest of downtown in 1925, on a campus laid out in Spanish Renaissance brick and tile that is one of the largest contiguous university campuses in the state. Texas Tech and its health sciences center are the city's biggest employer, and the student population is what keeps Broadway, the Depot District and the Overton area busy.

Outside the loop, the economy is agricultural: cotton gins, seed and chemical dealers, and the cotton classing and marketing offices that make Lubbock the trading center for the High Plains crop. Buddy Holly was born here in 1936 and buried here in 1959; the Buddy Holly Center on Crickets Avenue occupies the old Fort Worth and Denver depot, and the performing arts hall that opened in 2021 carries his name. The National Ranching Heritage Center, a collection of relocated historic ranch buildings, sits on the north side of the Texas Tech campus.