Elsecar Heritage Centre

Elsecar Heritage Centre, near Barnsley, has been on my list of places to visit for a while and I finally made it, just before Christmas. Similar in concept to Saltaire (though completely different in style), Elsecar is an industrial estate village that grew up around ironworks and collieries built for the Earls Fitzwilliam from nearby Wentworth Woodhouse. It's now a collection of independent shops, studios, galleries and cafés in the New Yard, the former Victorian workshops that housed the blacksmiths, engineers, carpenters and joiners that supported the ironworks and coalmines. Its heyday was the 1850s to 1880s. 

I am particularly interested in it because I've discovered that my great great grandfather, Benjamin James, brought his new wife Hannah up to Elsecar/Hoyland from Staffordshire in 1851. He was a iron moulder, a skilled job making sand moulds for metal castings. He moved up to Yorkshire as these ironworks were undergoing a rapid expansion and there must have been good jobs on offer. In fact, there were two foundries in close proximity and I think he probably worked in the other one, the Milton works - of which there is now little trace. The family had eleven children while they lived in Hoyland, though four died as infants. One daughter was my great grandmother, Annie, born in 1864. By the 1880s, these works were in trouble and they all moved to Sheffield, to the foundries around Kelham Island. 

There is still some conservation going on around the site and, whilst the buildings are being preserved, little remains of the actual machinery of the works. There's a useful AV introduction in the Visitors Centre and various sign boards around the site, though it didn't tell you specifically what each building was. It was all quite interesting and I'm really glad such places are being preserved and their history told.