Dinnington
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This article is about the town in South Yorkshire, for other uses see Dinnington (disambiguation).
Template:GBmap Dinnington is a town in rural South Yorkshire, England, and part of the metropolitan borough of Rotherham. It is roughly equidistant from Rotherham, Sheffield and Worksop, and is located at approximately Template:Coor dm, at an elevation of about 100 metres above sea level.
Dinnington is the principal settlement in the civil parish of Dinnington St. John's, which also includes the small satellite hamlets of Throapham and St. John's. The Dinnington St John's parish is the most populous constituent of the St. John's ward, which also includes the parishes of Laughton-en-le-Morthen, Firbeck, Letwell and Gildingwells. In 2001, this ward had a population of 11,476, with Dinnington itself making up at least 8,000 of that figure.
Excavations show Dinnington to have been inhabited since at least Neolithic times, and it has been suggested that the settlement takes its name from a local barrow, though a more traditional interpretation of "Dinnington" would be "Dunn's Farmstead".
Dinnington was originally a small, isolated farming community, based around the New Road area of the town. Quarrying in the area helped expand the population, but it was the sinking of the Dinnington Colliery in 1905 that led to the real growth of the settlement. The census of 1911 shows a twenty-fold increase in population since 1901, from 250 to 5000.
The coal miners initially lived in a prefabricated shanty town in Laughton Common but later moved into Colliery-built terrace houses around the central shopping area of Laughton Road.
Dinnington continued to expand throughout the 20th century, largely through the growth of commuter living that followed the Second World War. As the housing estates spread, Dinnington began to merge seamlessly into the neighbouring settlements of Throapham and North Anston. The result is a 3.5 km strip of urban development that mainly acts as a commuter base for Sheffield, Rotherham and Worksop.
In 1992, Dinnington Colliery was closed with a loss of 1000 jobs, devastating the local community. A business park on the colliery site, and small-scale commercial redevelopment has gone some way towards a recovery.
Dinnington has two further education establishments in the form of Rother Valley College and the sixth form college at Dinnington Comprehensive School.
In 2003, Dinnington declared itself a town in an attempt to attract more investment and improve the local economy. This puts Dinnington in the rather unusual position of being a town within a town in that it is part of the metropolitan borough of the town of Rotherham.