Arkwright Town, commonly referred to as Arkwright, is a village in Sutton cum Duckmanton,

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. The population ...

, England, that is notable for having moved its location in the early 1990s.Metropolitan Housing Trust stakeholders' newsletter, October 2005 Despite its name, the village has no official town status. Located between

Chesterfield Chesterfield may refer to: Places Canada * Rural Municipality of Chesterfield No. 261, Saskatchewan * Chesterfield Inlet, Nunavut United Kingdom * Chesterfield, Derbyshire, a market town in England ** Chesterfield (UK Parliament constitue ...

and

Bolsover Bolsover is a market town and the administrative centre of the Bolsover (borough), Bolsover District, Derbyshire, England. It is from London, from Sheffield, from Nottingham and from Derby, Derbyshire, Derby. It is the main town in the Bols ...

on the A632 road, it was formerly a

coal mining Coal mining is the process of extracting 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 ...

village. Arkwright Colliery closed in 1988 and it was then discovered that the community was threatened by emissions of

methane Methane ( , ) is a chemical compound with the chemical formula (one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). It is a group-14 hydride, the simplest alkane, and the main constituent of natural gas. The relative abundance of methane on Eart ...

gas that caused some of its houses to be evacuated. The whole village was owned by

British Coal The British Coal Corporation was a nationalised corporation responsible for the mining of coal in the United Kingdom from 1987 until it was effectively dissolved in 1997. The corporation was created by renaming its predecessor, the National Co ...

and a decision was made in cooperation with Derbyshire County Council to transfer ownership of the 52 properties to a

housing trust In Ireland and the United Kingdom, housing associations are private, non-profit making organisations that provide low-cost "social housing" for people in need of a home. Any budget surplus is used to maintain existing housing and to help fin ...

, construct a new village 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. Part of the deal with British Coal included the use of

open cast mining Open-pit mining, also known as open-cast or open-cut mining and in larger contexts mega-mining, is a surface mining technique of extracting rock or minerals from the earth from an open-air pit, sometimes known as a borrow. This form of mining ...

on a 100-acre site which began in November 1993 and continued until c. 2005. A new nature walk was established in 2010 following routes once used as railway lines.

See also

References

Further reading