Rotherham is a market town in South Yorkshire, England. It lies at the confluence of the River Rother, from which the town takes its name, and the River Don. It is the largest settlement in the Metropolitan Borough of Rotherham.
Before the Industrial Revolution, traditional industries included farming, glass making and flour milling. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, Rotherham became known for its coal mining and, later, steel industries. The town's historic county is Yorkshire, and Rotherham was once part of the West Riding of Yorkshire. In 1974, this administrative county was abolished during a reorganisation of local government. Subsequently, Rotherham became part of South Yorkshire, where it forms one of four metropolitan boroughs.
Rotherham had a population of 129,897 in the 2021 census. The borough had an estimate population of in 2024, the most populous district in England.
History Early history
Evidence of Iron Age and Roman settlements has been found in Rotherham area. This includes a small Roman fort to the south-west in the upper flood meadow of the Don at Templeborough.
Rotherham was founded in the early Middle Ages. Its name is from Old English 'homestead, estate', meaning 'homestead on the Rother'. The river name is of Brittonic origin for 'main river', 'over, chief' and 'water'. Another river called the Rother flows through East Sussex.Watts, Victor (ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names Based on the Collections of the English Place-Name Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), s.vv. ROTHERHAM and River ROTHER SYorks. An Anglo-Saxon settlement, with an ecclesiastical parish, was established near the Roman ford across the River Don.
The 1086 Domesday Book records a manor previously held by lord Hakon in 1066 tenanted by William the Conqueror's half-brother, Robert de Mortain. The 1086 record shows an absentee lord who held the most inhabited manor, Nigel Fossard. The town area today includes eight outlying Domesday estates. Eight adult male householders were counted as villagers, three were smallholders and one the priest, three ploughlands were tilled by one lord's plough team and two and a half men's plough teams were active. The manor also had a church, roughly four acres of meadow and seven woodland acres. Rotherham had a mill valued at half a pound sterling.Domesday Map Retrieved 6 February 2015.
Fossard's successors, the De Vesci family, rarely visited the town, but maintained a Friday market and a fair. In the mid 13th century, John de Vesci and Ralph de Tili gave all their possessions in Rotherham to Rufford Abbey. The monks from the abbey collected tithes from the town and gained rights to an extra market day on Monday and to extend the annual fair from two to three days.David Hey, Medieval South Yorkshire
The townsmen of Rotherham formed the "Greaves of Our Lady's Light", an organisation which worked with the town's three guilds. It was suppressed in 1547 but revived in 1584 as the feoffees of the common lands of Rotherham, and remains in existence.
In the 1480s, the Rotherham-born Archbishop of York, Thomas Rotherham, instigated the building of a College of Jesus in Rotherham to rival the colleges of Cambridge and Oxford. It was the first brick building in what is now South Yorkshire and taught theology, religious chant and hymns, grammar and writing.
The college and new parish of All Saints Church made Rotherham an enviable and modern town at the turn of the 16th century. The college was dissolved in 1547 during the reign of Edward VI, and its assets were stripped by the crown. Very little remains of the original building in College Street. Walls of part of the College of Jesus are encased within number 23 and Nos 2, 2A, 4 (later for a time Old College Inn, a beerhouse), 6 and 8 Effingham Street. A doorway was rescued from demolition and relocated to nearby Boston Park in 1879. Sixty years after the college's dissolution Rotherham was described by a wealthy visitor as falling from a fashionable college town to a place of gambling and vice. The history of Thomas Rotherham and education in the town are remembered in the name of Thomas Rotherham College.
Mary, Queen of Scots stayed in Rotherham for two nights at the end of January 1569. It has been suggested that she stayed in the college building. Two men, a Mr Lete and Mr Bayley, were paid for guarding her.
Industrial Revolution The Rotherham area had been used for iron production since the Roman occupation of Britain. Toward the end of the 18th century, coal seams near the town made Rotherham an important settlement in the Industrial Revolution. Coal was exported from the town by river, and this led to infrastructure improvements in the River Don's navigability. The River Don eventually became an artery of the Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation system of navigable inland waterways.
During the early Industrial Revolution, iron, and later steel, became the principal industries in Rotherham, surviving into the 20th century. The Walker family built an iron empire in the 18th century, their foundries producing high quality cannons, including the majority of guns for the ship HMS Victory, and cast iron bridges, one of which was commissioned by Thomas Paine.
Rotherham's cast iron industry expanded rapidly in the early 19th century, with the Effingham Ironworks, later Yates, Haywood & Co, opening in 1820. Other major iron founders included William Corbitt and Co; George Wright and Co of Burton Weir; Owen and Co of Wheathill Foundry; Morgan Macauley and Waide of the Baths Foundry; the Masbro' Stove Grate Co belonging to Messrs. Perrot, W. H. Micklethwait and John and Richard Corker of the Ferham Works. G & WG Gummer Ltd exported brass products across the world, supplying fittings for hotels, hospitals, Victorian Turkish baths and the RMS Mauretania. Their fittings could also be found on battleships used in the Second World War and HMS Ark Royal.
The Parkgate Ironworks was established in 1823 by Sanderson and Watson, and changed ownership several times. In 1854, Samuel Beal & Co produced wrought iron plates for Isambard Kingdom Brunel's famous steamship the SS Great Eastern. In 1864, the ironworks was taken over by the Parkgate Iron Co. Ltd, becoming the Park Gate Iron and Steel Company in 1888. The company was purchased by Tube Investments Ltd in 1956 and closed in 1974. Steel, Peech and Tozer's massive Templeborough steelworks (now the Magna Science Adventure Centre) was, at its peak, over long, employing 10,000 workers, and housing six electric arc furnaces producing 1.8 million tonnes of steel a year. The operation closed down in 1993.
The first railway stations, Holmes and Rotherham Westgate, both on the Sheffield and Rotherham Railway, opened on 31 October 1838. Holmes station was located close to the works of Isaac Dodds and Son, pioneers in the development of railway technology. Later stations included Parkgate and Aldwarke on the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway, which opened in July 1873; Parkgate and Rawmarsh on the North Midland Railway, and also on the North Midland Railway.
Rotherham Forge and Rolling Mill occupied an island in the river known as Forge Island. Its managing director was Francis Charles Moss of Wickersley, until his death in 1942. The site was later occupied by a Tesco superstore and, by 2024, was the location of a new leisure development with an eight-screen cinema, food and drink outlets, and a hotel. Completion was initially scheduled for October 2021, but the project was delayed, with most facilities are opening during 2024.Aroundtown Magazine, May/June 2024, p. 22
Joseph Foljambe established a factory to produce his Rotherham plough which he patented in 1730, the first commercially successful iron plough.
A glass works was set up in Rotherham in 1751 and became Beatson Clark & Co, one of the town's largest manufacturers, exporting glass medicine bottles worldwide. Beatson Clark & Co was a family business until 1961, when it became a public company. The glass works operated on the same site, although the family connection ceased and the company is owned by Newship Ltd, a holding company linked to the industrialist John Watson Newman. It continues to the manufacture glass containers for the pharmaceutical, food and drinks industries. In the 19th century, other successful industries included pottery, brass making and the manufacture of cast iron fireplaces. Precision manufacturing companies in the town include AESSEAL, Nikken Kosakusho Europe, MTL Advanced, MGB Plastics and Macalloy. Rotherham is the location of the Advanced Manufacturing Park (AMP), which is home to a number of world-class companies including Rolls-Royce and McLaren Automotive.
Milling grain into flour was a traditional industry in Rotherham, formerly in the Millmoor area, hence Rotherham United F.C.'s nickname "The Millers". Flour milling continued at the Rank Hovis town mill site on Canklow Road until September 2008. The site of the mill is now a warehousing and distribution facility for local logistics company, 4S Distribution.
Enterprise zone 1983 In 1983, Rotherham became a designated enterprise zone with benefits and incentives given to attract new industry and development in the area. Within the first year, ten new companies were established within the zone. The former chemical works at Barbot Hall, which had been derelict, was developed into a new industrial estate and named 'Brookside', after Mangham Brook, which runs alongside it.'Rotherham now has new hope' p 31 Morning Telegraph Industrial Survey 9 January 1985
Floods of 2007
Rotherham was affected by flooding in the summer of 2007. This caused the closure of central roads, schools and transport services; it damaged residential and commercial property, including the Parkgate Shopping complex and the Meadowhall Centre, which suffered considerable internal water damage. Ulley Reservoir became a focus of major concern when its dam showed signs of structural damage, threatening to break and release water into the suburbs of Treeton, Brinsworth and Canklow as threatening the Junction 33 electrical sub-station. Thousands of homes were evacuated in response. Rother FM evacuated its studios, passing its frequency temporarily to neighbouring station Trax FM. A stretch of the M1 motorway was closed for three days due to the flood risk. Fire service and police officers used multiple high-powered pumps to lower the water level in the reservoir and reduce pressure on the dam wall, which was damaged but held. By summer 2008, the reservoir and surrounding country park reopened.
A new wetland and flood storage area, Centenary Riverside park, has since been built by Rotherham Council and the Environment Agency to prevent flooding in the future. The Wildlife Trust for Sheffield and Rotherham manages the site as a local nature reserve. The site is home to the massive sculpture Steel Henge, a Stonehenge replica which is in fact made from iron ingots.
Child sexual exploitation scandal
Following a 2012 article published in The Times newspaper revealing the cover-up of large-scale sexual abuse of young children by gangs of people of Pakistani origin in Rotherham, Rotherham Council commissioned Professor Alexis Jay, a former chief social work adviser to the Scottish government, to lead an independent inquiry about the handling of the cases and a suspected child exploitation network. She issued a report on the child sexual exploitation scandal that extended beyond the cases investigated by the police. Her report of August 2014 revealed an unprecedented scale of reported child sexual abuse within an urban area of this size over a 16-year period. Subsequently, Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, commissioned Louise Casey to conduct a best value investigation of Rotherham Council. She issued a report of her findings in February 2015.