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Ilkeston
An introduction...
Ilkeston is trying to come to terms with the problems caused by the loss of large scale employment in coal, heavy industry and the textile trade. A town centre regeneration plan, now adopted, will address the challenges facing Ilkeston, situated between Nottingham (16kms) and Derby (17kms). The town is seeking to avoid becoming a 'clone' shopping area like so many town centre shopping developments and create a centre to take advantage of the buildings and the character of the older parts of the town, particularly the Market Place area.
Brownfield site industrial estates are being developed at Quarry Hill, Manners Avenue and Cossall with ambitious plans for the redevelopment of part of the Saint Gobain (Stanton Ironworks) site.
Ilkeston does not have a railway station and Langley Mill, Long Eaton and Attenborough are the nearest for local services with access to the national rail network at Nottingham and Derby. The M1 skirts the town to the south east with access via the A6096 and A610 to junction 26. Local bus operators serve the town and surrounding areas, there is a fast bus link to Derby and regular services to Nottingham. From Spring 2009 a new Skylink service will run from Ilkeston to the East Midlands Airport (24kms) at Castle Donington.
The town has excellent sports facilities at the Victoria Leisure Centre and other venues and there are a surprising number of green spaces for an industrial town. Every year the three day Charter Fair, which celebrated its 750th. anniversary in 2002, is held in the Market Place and surrounding streets and is one of the largest street fairs held in the country.
A brief history...
Ilkeston stands on a sandstone rise bordered by the River Erewash and the Nutbrook. Prehistoric and Roman finds have been made but the town's origin appears to be as an Anglo Saxon settlement, becoming part of the Danelaw in the ninth century. The Domesday Book of 1086 mentions 'Tilchestune', possibly the first letter is a Norman spelling mistake, and the manor was given to a Gilbert de Ghent before passing through the hands of several notable families in the medieval period. In 1252 Ilkeston was granted a weekly market and annual fair charter which continues to this day.
The town continued to grow slowly and by the beginning of the 17th.C the population was little more than 500 mainly engaged in agriculture and producing wool for the textile trade. Two hundred years later many cottagers in the town were framework knitters for the burgeoning hosiery trade and within fifty years the town had eleven hosiery or lace factories and the population had grown to almost fourteen thousand.
The Erewash and Nutbrook Canals had been constructed in the late eighteenth century to carry coal, which had been worked locally since the early 17th.C, from both mines and opencast working. In the mid-nineteenth century three blast furnaces were built on the banks of the Nutbrook Canal producing pig iron, this business flourished and became the Stanton Ironworks, employing at its height over seven thousand workers.
A church has stood on the site of the present parish church of St. Mary the Virgin since the mid twelfth century although, apart from three Norman arches, little evidence remains of that church or its later extensions and alterations. Bath Street in Ilkeston is the only reminder of a period of sixty years up to 1900 when Ilkeston's natural mineral waters were exploited by a local businessman who built the Ilkeston Baths to try and rival popular spa towns like Bath Spa and Harrogate.
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