Stainforth – from royal charter to coalfields and a vision for the future

Despite King Edward III, who is credited with transforming England into one of the most formidable powers in Europe, granting Stainforth a Royal Charter in 1348, the resultant economic high the settlement saw as a commercial centre and port was relatively brief.

For hundreds of years, Stainforth, an Anglo-Saxon settlement featured in the Domesday Book as having seven households, remained stubbornly primarily agricultural as its weekly market and an annual ten-day fair petered out.

One visible heritage asset is Town End Farmhouse, overlooking Stainforth and Keadby Canal, which was built in 1793 and saw some 800,000 tons of traffic in 1937.

However, Stainforth lock, which connected the canal to the River Don, closed just two years later. Today iit s mainly used by narrow boat holidaymakers.

Nearby is one of the more recent housing developments, Lord Porter Avenue, which was named after George Porter, was born nearby in 1920, who ranks among Stainforth’s most distinguised sons.

In 1967, he won the Nobel Prize for work on chemical reactions triggered by light, and for photographing the behaviour of molecules during fast reactions. The chemist attended Thorne Grammar School before studying at the University of Leeds.

To the north of Stainforth is a flat, arable landscape and the River Don, but views to its south are radically different. It was in a farm field on the south-edge of Stainforth that its future utterly changed in 1911 with the sinking of a colliery, which attracted workers from across the country to the area.

The Doncaster Chronicle of March 5, 1915, proclaimed it was impossible to visit the area without being impressed with the changes that were coming over the scene: “Here we have a district, once the happy hunting ground of Kings and Monarchs, now destined to become a centre of coal and commerce.

"On the spot where royalty once disported themselves, where archers drew the long bow and sent their shafts at the red deer, are now shafts of a very different character, up which the latest machinery will wind coal from the bowels of the earth.”

Hatfield Main Colliery Company sunk two shafts and became the country’s first mine to employ a newly-developed grouting process to pass through the local shifting sands and waterlogged sandstone.

Going into production with just shaft sinking headgear, headstocks for double-decker cages which have become a landmark of the area, and winding engine houses were completed in 1922.

In December 1939 disaster struck as the cage lifting morning shift miners in the upcast shaft overshot, smashing into the headgear, leading to the men on the afternoon shift who were being lowered down the shaft hitting the pit bottom with force.

Dozens of the miners suffered fractured limbs and some ten men and boys needed amputations. Stoneworker Daniel Horrigan, of Arundel Street, Stainforth was killed.

By the 1930s weekly output exceeded 20,000 tons and the colliery had been deepened to also work the High Hazel seam. While there were 3,600 employees, management said there was work for 500 more coal-getters and 100 other hands, so building sufficient housing was among most pressing issues.

To provide an entertainment outlet for the expanding workforce, a huge amount of sand, concrete and cinder was laid down over marshland to create Stainforth Stadium, a speedway dirt track, in 1929, before the firm behind the venture going into liquidation months later

During the Second World War a greyhound track was added and after decades as a non-professional flapping track and more as a derelict arena, a huge investment saw a three-tier grandstand, restaurant and bars developed and in 2004 the first Yorkshire St Leger race run.

Much housing in Stainforth reflects the demand of the colliery, which was closed by British Coal in 1993, before being reopened a year later and worked through until nine years ago.

Alongside slag heaps, the most visible remnant of mining in Stainforth are the headstocks, which have been given listed building status due to their rarity and being “the most readily recognisable structure of the coal industry”.

Among the few remaining reminders of Stainforth’s heavy industrial past is the Pitman’s Pantry cafe on Church Road, which serves up hearty meals the miners would have relished, such as mince pie and lamb stew and dumplings. Another link is Waggons Way, a road leading from the former colliery to Hatfield and Stainforth railway station.

However, in 2021 it was announced Stainforth had been awarded £21.6 million through the government’s Towns Fund.

Residents have voted overwhelmingly to approve the adoption of a neighbourhood plan which establishes five key goals: protecting and enhancing local mining heritage, improving housing choice, improving accessibility for all, supporting health and wellbeing and local development opportunities.

The scheme has addressed complex issues involved in transforming the former pit site to proposals for listed buildings, such as the headstocks.

Such is the level of pride in the mining heritage and determination to preseve Stainforth’s link with the colliery, the development of the plans have partly been crowdfunded.

Ambitions have included transforming the station gateway, improving Stainforth’s centre, and restoring the former Hatfield Main Colliery headstocks into a heritage centre and country park.