Grangetown, North Yorkshire
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Grangetown is a township in borough of Redcar and Cleveland and the ceremonial county of North Yorkshire, England, however it is more closely related to Middlesbrough and the rest of Redcar and Cleveland. It is historically part of the parish and urban district of Eston and was part of the parliamentary borough of Middlesbrough as oppose to the official municipal or county borough of Middlesbrough. This fact has been recently discarded in favour of its own belonging as it once rejected a proposal to amalgamate the area into the official municipal & county borough of Middlesbrough. As well as being part of the parliamentary borough, it also still holds a Middlesbrough postal address and area code. Today Grangetown is part of the Eston urban district and is a ward within the borough of Redcar & Cleveland although still considered part of the Town of Middlesbrough due to no physical boundaries and the urban areas merging together. It has a population of approximately 8,000 residents.
The impetus for the development of Grangetown was the discovery of ironstone in the Eston Hills in 1840, and the subsequent development of the iron and steel industry along the riverbanks by Messrs. Bolckow and Vaughan. By 1914, it was a compact and self-sufficient community of approximately 5,500 people with the majority of the houses lying between Bolckow Road and the steel works. There was a market square, shopping centre, boarding school, three pubs, six places of worship, a police station and public bathhouse. Though the inhabitants came from many parts of the country, the community had built up a strong identity and local pride. The majority of men worked in the steel works but a wide range of skills was represented within the town and a whole cross-section of society lived together in the town.
Grangetown underwent a period of quite rapid expansion between 1914 and 1939. Both the steel companies and the local council built estates from Bolckow Road to and across the new Trunk Road. The population in 1939 was approximately 9,000. After the war council house building was extended and in the 1950s reached Fabian Road.
- [Grangetown in Past Times]
- [Genuki - History of Eston parish & District] Descriptions from Bulmer's History and Directory of North Yorkshire (1890), retreived 8th February 2006
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