Leadgate is a village in County Durham, in

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

. It is situated to the north-east of Consett. The Roman road

Dere Street Dere Street or Deere Street is a modern designation of a Roman road which ran north from Eboracum (York), crossing the Stanegate at Corbridge (Hadrian's Wall was crossed at the Portgate, just to the north) and continuing beyond into what is n ...

runs straight through the middle of Leadgate, today this is known as Durham Road and the B6309. The place-name 'Leadgate' is first attested in 1590 and derives from the

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...

'hlidgeat', which means 'swing-gate'. The parish church of St Ives was built in 1865–68. The Roman Catholic church of Our Blessed Lady and St. Joseph lies a little way out of the village at Brooms. It was built 1866-69 by

E. W. Pugin Edward Welby Pugin (11 March 1834 – 5 June 1875) was an English architect, the eldest son of architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin and Louisa Barton and part of the Pugin & Pugin family of church architects. His father was an architect an ...

and served the Irish migrant community. Leadgate was the home of the workers and staff of the Eden colliery which opened in 1844, and was closed on the 18 July 1980. It was also home to many working for the Consett Iron Company (about 2 miles away) and which closed in the 1980s. Leadgate now stands as a small village with a close-knit community. Plans to regenerate the area have been on the local councils' planning board for some time and improvements are being made. The retail economy of Leadgate is centered on Front Street which until the construction of the Leadgate bypass formed one of the main routes from Newcastle into Consett. Front Street hosts a number of independent businesses as well as a local co-operative. The coast-to-coast cycle route runs through Leadgate and follows the path of the former Stanhope and Tyne railway. The last train ran on the line on 17 March 1984. St Ives is the Parish Church. On 17 August 2020 the Bradley open-cast mine, the last

coal mine 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 ...

in England, was closed.

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* * Villages in County Durham Consett {{Durham-geo-stub