Arkwright Town
Encyclopedia
- For the settlement with a similar name in the USA see Arkwright, New YorkArkwright, New YorkArkwright is a town in Chautauqua County, New York, in the USA. As of the 2000 census, the town population was 1,126. The town is named after Richard Arkwright, the inventor of a spinning device....
Arkwright Town, commonly referred to as Arkwright, is a settlement in North East Derbyshire
North East Derbyshire
North East Derbyshire is a local government district in Derbyshire, England. It borders the districts of Chesterfield, Bolsover, Amber Valley and Derbyshire Dales in Derbyshire, and Sheffield and Rotherham in South Yorkshire....
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
that is notable for having moved its location in the early 1990s. Despite its name, the settlement has no official town
Town
A town is a human settlement larger than a village but smaller than a city. The size a settlement must be in order to be called a "town" varies considerably in different parts of the world, so that, for example, many American "small towns" seem to British people to be no more than villages, while...
status.
Located between Chesterfield
Chesterfield
Chesterfield is a market town and a borough of Derbyshire, England. It lies north of Derby, on a confluence of the rivers Rother and Hipper. Its population is 70,260 , making it Derbyshire's largest town...
and Bolsover
Bolsover
Bolsover is a town near Chesterfield, Derbyshire, England. It is 145 miles from London, 18 miles from Sheffield, 26 miles from Nottingham and 54 miles from Manchester. It is the main town in the Bolsover district.The civil parish for the town is called...
on the A632 road it was formerly a coal mining
Coal mining
The goal of coal mining is to obtain coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its energy content, and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from iron ore and for cement production. In the United States,...
village. Arkwright Colliery closed in 1988 and it was then discovered that the community was threatened by emissions of methane
Methane
Methane is a chemical compound with the chemical formula . It is the simplest alkane, the principal component of natural gas, and probably the most abundant organic compound on earth. The relative abundance of methane makes it an attractive fuel...
gas that caused some of its houses to be evacuated. The whole settlement was owned by British Coal
British Coal
thumb|right|British Coal company logoThe British Coal Corporation was a nationalised corporation in the United Kingdom responsible for the extraction of coal...
and a decision was taken, along with Derbyshire County Council, to transfer ownership of the 52 properties to a housing trust, construct a new settlement of 56 properties to the north of the site affected by methane, and move all the residents. Construction was completed by 1995 when the old Arkwright Town was demolished.
See also
- Adelphi CanalAdelphi CanalThe Adelphi Canal was a small privately-owned canal in Duckmanton, near Chesterfield, England. It was used to transport goods from an ironworks to a wharf by the road. It is not connected to any other waterway; goods were forwarded by road to the Chesterfield Canal...
A new nature walk was established in 2010 using the uninhabitable waste land that was once used as a railway line.