Worksop


Worksop is the largest town in the Bassetlaw district of Nottinghamshire, England. Worksop lies on the River Ryton, and is located at the northern edge of Sherwood Forest. Worksop is located east-south-east of Sheffield, with a population of 41,820. It lies close to Nottinghamshire’s borders with South Yorkshire, and Derbyshire.
Worksop has become a commuter town as a result of its geographic location and ease of access to major motorways and rail links.
Worksop is known as the "Gateway to The Dukeries", because of the now four obsolete ducal principal sites of which were closely located next to each other, south of the town. These four ducal locations were; Clumber House, Thoresby Hall, Welbeck Abbey and Worksop Manor. Other houses such as Rufford Abbey and Hodsock Priory are also just a few miles away.
Worksop is twinned with the German town Garbsen.

History

Evidence that Worksop existed before the Norman conquest of England in 1066 is provided by the Domesday Book of 1086:
In about 1103, William de Lovetot established a castle and the Augustinian priory at Worksop. Subsequently, Worksop grew into a market town.
A skirmish occurred in the area during the Wars of the Roses on 16 December 1460, commonly known as the Battle of Worksop.
The building of the Chesterfield Canal in 1777, and the subsequent construction of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway in 1849, both of which passed through the settlement, led to a degree of growth. Discovery of sizeable coal seams further increased interest in the area.
Coal mining provided thousands of jobs in and around Worksop for most of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Additionally, much of the area being heavily forested, timber was always an important industry - supplying railway sleepers to the North Midland Railway, timber for the construction of railway carriages and packing cases for the Sheffield cutlery industry. The town also became notable for the manufacture of Worksop Windsor Chairs. Timber firms in the town included Benjamin Garside’s woodyard and Godley and Goulding, situated between Eastgate and the railway.
The closure in the 1990s of the pits, compounding the earlier decline of the timber trade and other local industry, resulted in high unemployment and the soaring of local drug abuse.
Unemployment levels in the area are now lower than the national average, owing to large number of distribution and local manufacturing companies, including Premier Foods, Wilko, RDS Transport, Pandrol UK Ltd and Laing O'Rourke.

Transport

Road

Worksop lies on the A57 and A60 with links to the A1 and M1.

Rail

Worksop is on the Sheffield-Lincoln line, with direct trains running to Sheffield, Leeds and Lincoln. Services call at Retford, Gainsborough, Saxilby, Shireoaks, Kiveton Park, Kiveton Bridge, Woodhouse, Darnall, Meadowhall, Barnsley and Wakefield. These services are run by Northern. Worksop is also the terminus of the Robin Hood line to Nottingham via Mansfield, a service run by East Midlands Railway. On Saturdays Northern also runs three services to Grimsby and Cleethorpes via Gainsborough.

Buses

Bus services provided by Stagecoach East Midlands operate in the town to Doncaster, Shireoaks, Langold, Harworth, Bawtry, Retford, Blyth, Bircotes, Clowne, Tickhill, Chesterfield, Ollerton, and Nottingham; Stagecoach also run internal services within Worksop.

Education

Primary

Worksop is served by Bassetlaw District General Hospital, part of the Doncaster and Bassetlaw NHS Foundation Trust. Bassetlaw Hospital treats ~33,000 people each year, as well as ~38,000 emergencies. Bassetlaw Hospital is one of the University of Sheffield Teaching hospitals Medical School.
Mental Health services in Worksop are provided by Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust who provide both in-patient and community services. Wards run by Nottinghamshire Healthcare provide training for medical students at the University of Nottingham.

Local economy

The local economy in Worksop is dominated by service industries, manufacturing and distribution.
Major employers in the area include Premier Foods, Greencore, Wilko, RDS Transport, B&Q, MAKE polymers, OCG Cacao, part of Cargill, Pandrol, GCHQ and the NHS.

Religion

Worksop has three churches which are all on the National Heritage List for England.
Officially titled the Priory Church of Saint Mary and Saint Cuthbert, is the Anglican parish church usually known as Worksop Priory. It was an Augustinian Priory founded in 1103. The church has a nave and detached gatehouse. Monks at the priory made the Tickhill Psalter, an illuminated manuscripts of the medieval period, now held in New York Public Library. After the dissolution of the Monasteries the east end of the church fell into disrepair, but the townspeople were granted the nave as a parish church. The eastern parts of the building have been restored in several phases, the most recent being in the 1970s when the architect Lawrence King rebuilt the crossing.
St. Anne's Church is an Anglican parish church and is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade II listed building. The church was built in 1911 by the Lancaster architects Austin and Paley. The church has an historic pipe organ originally built by Gray and Davison in 1852 for Clapham Congregational Church.
St. John's Church is a Parish church built between 1867 and 1868 by architect Robert Clarke.

Places of interest

, the family home of the Straw family, was inherited by the Straw brothers, William and Walter when their parents died in the 1930s. The house remained unaltered until the National Trust acquired it in the 1990s and opened it to the public. Clumber Park, south of Worksop is a country park, also owned by the National Trust, and is open to the public.

Notable people