Place:Derby, Derbyshire, England

Watchers
NameDerby
Alt namesLitchurchsource: from redirect
Deorabysource: Encyclopædia Britannica (1988) IV, 22
Northworthsource: Hutchinson Family Encyclopedia Online
City of Derbysource: name of unitary authority formed in 1974
Rowditchsource: manufacturing suburb
TypeCity, Borough (county), Unitary authority
Coordinates52.917°N 1.5°W
Located inDerbyshire, England
See alsoRepton and Gresley Hundred, Derbyshire, Englandhundred in which it was located

NOTE: A map of Derby within Derbyshire will be found further down the page. There are further maps of parts of Derby in Wikimedia Commons.

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Derby is a city and unitary authority area in Derbyshire, England. It lies on the banks of the River Derwent in the southeast of Derbyshire, of which it was traditionally the county town, but this connotation was transferred to Matlock when Derby became a unitary authority. At the 2011 census, the population was 248,700. Derby gained city status in 1977.

Derby was settled by Romans (who established the town of Derventio), followed by Saxons and Vikings, who made Derby one of the Five Boroughs of the Danelaw. Initially a market town, Derby grew rapidly in the industrial era. Home to Lombe's Mill, an early British factory, Derby has a claim to be one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution. It contains the southern part of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site. With the arrival of the railways in the 19th century, Derby became a centre of the British rail industry.

Derby is a centre for advanced transport manufacturing, home to the world's second largest aero-engine manufacturer, Rolls-Royce. Bombardier Transportation are based at the Derby Litchurch Lane Works and were for many years the UK's only train manufacturer. (Bombardier was sold to Alstom of France in early 2021 and its manufacturing base in Derby can no longer be considered as a permanent fixture.) Toyota Manufacturing UK's automobile headquarters is southwest of the city at Burnaston.

Industrial History

The following section is a condensation of the History section of Wikipedia's article on Derby. For the earlier history of Derby, see Wikipedia.

Derby and Derbyshire were centres of Britain's Industrial Revolution. In 1717, Derby was the site of the first water powered silk mill in Britain, built by John Lombe and George Sorocold.

In 1759, machines to industrialize the making of stockings, socks and hose were patented by Jedediah Strutt with William Wollatt, John Bloodworth and Thomas Stafford, joined later by Samuel Need of Nottingham. The original framework knitting machine on which this was based was developed by Rev. Lee. The manufacture of hosiery led to cotton spinning on machines designed by Richard Arkwright in 1771 and to factories built by Jedediah Strutt producing cotton yarn during the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

The beginning of the 19th century saw Derby emerging as an engineering centre with manufacturers such as James Fox. With the coming of railways in 1840, engineering firms set up works in Derby to produce locomotives and rolling stock for the North Midland Railway and later the Midland Railway.

In the 20th century, Derby's industrial scene was joined by the car and aircraft factories of Rolls Royce. Since 1992 the UK headquarters of Toyota is found just south of the city at Burnaston.

Governance in the 19th and 20th centuries

:the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Derby was one of the boroughs reformed by the Municipal Corporations Act 1835, and it became a county borough with the Local Government Act 1888. The borough expanded in 1877 to include Little Chester and Litchurch, and then in 1890 added what is now Derby's Abbey Ward including the neighbourhoods of Normanton and Rowditch.

The borough did not increase substantially again until 1968, when under a recommendation of the Local Government Boundary Commission it was expanded into large parts of the rural district of Belper, Repton and South East Derbyshire. This vastly increased Derby's population from 132,408 in the 1961 census to 219,578 in the 1971 census.

Until they were formally absorbed into the County Borough of Derby in 1898, the following former ancient or ecclesiastical parishes of the city were recognized as civil parishes: Derby All Saints, Derby St. Alkmund, Derby St. Michael, Derby St. Peter and Derby St. Werburgh. A Vision of Britain through Time lists further ecclesiastical parishes of Derby which did not become civil parishes.

Image:325px-Derby UK locator map.svg.png

Research Tips

  • Derbyshire Record Office website
  • British History Online (Victoria County Histories) does not appear to cover Derbyshire geographically. A History of the County of Derby: Volume 2, edited by William Page is a part-volume covering the religious houses of the county. No further volumes have been found.
  • GENUKI main page for Derbyshire which provides information on various topics covering the whole of the county, and also a link to a list of parishes. Under each parish there is a list of the settlements within it and brief description of each. This is a list of pre-1834 ancient or ecclesiastical parishes but there are suggestions as to how to find parishes set up since then. GENUKI provides references to other organizations who hold genealogical information for the local area. There is no guarantee that the website has been kept up to date and therefore the reader should check additional sources if possible.
  • The FamilyTree Wiki has a series of pages similar to those provided by GENUKI which may have been prepared at a later date and from more recent data. The wiki has a link to English Jurisdictions 1851 which gives the registration district and wapentake for each parish, together with statistics from the 1851 census for the area.
  • A Vision of Britain through Time, Derbyshire, section "Units and Statistics" leads to analyses of population and organization of the county from about 1800 through 1974. There are pages available for all civil parishes, municipal boroughs and other administrative divisions. Descriptions provided are usually based on a gazetteer of 1870-72 which often provides brief notes on the economic basis of the settlement and significant occurences through its history.
  • For a more detailed view of a specific area try a map from the following selection. The oldest series are very clear at the third magnification offered. Comparing the map details with the GENUKI details for the same area is well worthwhile. Sections of the 1900 map showing parish boundaries only have been reproduced on some (but not all) parish pages here in WeRelate.
  • Map of Derbyshire illustrating urban and rural districts in 1900 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown.
  • Map of Derbyshire urban and rural districts in 1944 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown. This is not a repeat of the first map. There were some changes in urban and rural district structure in the 1930s.
  • Ordnance Survey map of Derbyshire for 1967 This is the last in this series and was made while Derbyshire was experimenting with the non-metropolitan district structure adopted in 1974. It is a much cleaner map for reading the names of the civil parishes, but the smaller villages are no longer visible.
These are only three of the series of maps to be found in A Vision of Britain through Time.
This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Derby. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.