Monday, 28 June 2021 - 11:00 am (CET/MEZ) Berlin | Author/Destination: Great Britain / Großbritannien Category/Kategorie: GeneralReading Time: 5minutes
Rotherham> is a large minster town in South Yorkshire, England. It is the main settlement in the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham. Located on the traditional road between Sheffield and Doncaster. The Rother (Rotherham’s namesake) merges with the River Don. The Don then flows through the town centre. Traditional industries included glass making and flour milling. Most around the time of the industrial revolution, it was also known as a coal mining town as well as a contributor to the steel industry. The town’s Historic county is Yorkshire. From 1889 until 1974, the County of York’s ridings became counties in their own right, the West Riding of Yorkshire was the town’s county while South Yorkshire is its current county. Rotherham had a 109,691 population in the 2011 census. The district borough, governed from the town, had a mid-2019 est. population of 265,411, the 60th most populous district in England.
Rotherham Minster or All Saints’ Church in All Saints Square built largely of neat-cut pieces of sandstone and low-pitch lead roofs dates from the 15th century and includes parts from earlier Saxon and Norman structures. Clayton and Bell working to George Gilbert Scott‘s designs constructed the east window. Stained glass makers and designers A. Gibbs, Camm Brothers, Heaton, Butler and Bayne and James Bell are known makers of the other windows. Gargoyles flank its clock on each face. It has a “recessed octagonal spire with crocketed arrises and pinnacled shafts rising from corner faces and a gilded weathervane.” Architectural critics Pevsner and Simon Jenkins considered it “the best perpendicular [style] church in the country” and “the best work in the county”, respectively. It is a listed building in the highest category of architecture, Grade I.
Close to the town centre is the 15th-century Chapel of Our Lady of Rotherham Bridge (or “Chapel on the Bridge”), beside Chantry Bridge (a road bridge opened in the 1930s). It is one of four surviving bridge chapels in the country. The chapel was restored in 1923, having been used as the town jail and a tobacconist‘s shop.
Built in the 18th century, Clifton House houses Clifton Park Museum. The remains of the 16th-century College of Jesus are in the town centre. Boston Castle, in the grounds of Boston Park, was built as a hunting lodge by Thomas Howard, 3rd Earl of Effingham between 1773 and 1774 to mark his opposition to British attempts to crush the Americans in their war for independence. It is named after Boston, Massachusetts, the scene of the Boston Tea Party.
On the outskirts of Rotherham, a brick-built glass making furnace, the Catcliffe Glass Cone, is the oldest surviving structure of its type in Western Europe and one of four remaining in the United Kingdom – the others being the Red House Cone in the Wordsley centre of the Dudley Glassworks in the West Midlands, Lemington Glass Works west of Newcastle upon Tyne and Alloa in Scotland. Threatened with demolition in the 1960s, it has been preserved as a Scheduled Ancient Monument and stands as a focal point in a sheltered housing complex and close to the path leading up the Rother valley.
South of Maltby in the east of the district, half-way to Worksop are the ruins of Roche Abbey, among the small minority in the United Kingdom bearing multi-storey walls, as most others are no more than foundations or a single storey of ruins following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s.
