Town in South Yorkshire, England
Rotherham
Rotherham gave the world a plough that changed farming, a steelworks that became a science centre, and the Chuckle Brothers' "To me, to you".
Key information
- County
- South Yorkshire
- Nation
- England
- Known for
- Steel, the Rotherham plough, Rotherham Minster and Magna
- What locals are called
- Rotherhamites; football fans are the Millers
- Famous people
- The Chuckle Brothers, Archbishop Thomas Rotherham, Joseph Foljambe, Ebenezer Elliott
- Football clubs
- Rotherham United (the Millers), who play at the New York Stadium
About Rotherham
The plough that rolled out of Rotherham
In 1730 Joseph Foljambe, a Rotherham man, patented a plough that quietly rewrote farming. The Rotherham plough was light, its share and mouldboard were shaped for turning soil cleanly, and it was plated with iron. Earlier ploughs were heavy, clumsy wooden affairs that needed teams of horses or oxen. Foljambe's design is widely seen as the first iron-plated plough to be made in numbers and sold commercially. It was a sign of what was coming. Rotherham sat beside coal, iron ore and fast water, and it was ideally placed to turn metal into money.
From iron bridges to steel city's little sibling
The Walker family of Masbrough turned Rotherham into an ironfounding powerhouse in the 1700s and 1800s. Their works cast heavy goods, including the ironwork for Southwark Bridge in London, which opened in 1819. The family's mausoleum still stands in Masbrough. Steel followed iron. Great melt shops and rolling mills filled the Don Valley, and for generations Rotherham men went down the pits or into the furnaces. The mining and steel industries shrank in the late twentieth century, and the 1984–85 miners' strike left deep marks on communities all around the town. The story has an unexpected final chapter. One of those vast steelworks was converted into Magna, a science adventure centre that opened in 2001. That same year it won the Stirling Prize, the top award in British architecture, for turning a cathedral of steel into somewhere to play with fire, water, earth and air.
The chapel on the bridge
Rotherham's most unusual landmark sits right on the River Don: the Chapel of Our Lady on Rotherham Bridge. Medieval travellers would stop here to say a prayer before or after crossing. Only a handful of these bridge chapels survive in England, and Rotherham's dates from the 1480s. A short walk away is Rotherham Minster, the town's great medieval church, with soaring Perpendicular Gothic windows and a fine carved interior. It has stood on a church site for centuries and is one of the finest in South Yorkshire. Further up the hill is Boston Castle, a small sandstone hunting lodge built between 1773 and 1775 for Thomas Howard, 3rd Earl of Effingham, and now a park viewpoint. Just outside town, Wentworth Woodhouse has a famously huge frontage, thought to be the longest country house façade in Europe at around 606 feet.
The archbishop who took the town's name
Thomas Rotherham was born in the town in 1423 and rose to become Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor of England. He even took the town's name as his own. He founded Jesus College in Rotherham in 1483, a school for the town's boys, and he was a major benefactor at Cambridge. A later Rotherham voice was Ebenezer Elliott, born in Masbrough in 1781. Known as the Corn Law Rhymer, he wrote fiery poems against the tax on imported grain, which kept bread dear for working families. His statue stands in Sheffield now, but his roots were in Rotherham's foundries.
To me, to you: the Chuckle Brothers
For comic fame, the Chuckle Brothers take some beating. Barry and Paul Chuckle were born in Rotherham, in 1944 and 1947, and became household names with ChuckleVision, the CBBC series that ran for over two decades. Their catchphrases, "To me, to you" and "Oh dear, oh dear", were shouted in school playgrounds across the country. Their slapstick came from a long Rotherham music-hall and variety-club apprenticeship. They are still the town's best-loved double act.
The Millers and the New York Stadium
Rotherham United are the Millers, a nickname that goes back to the area's old milling past. The club was formed in 1925 from a merger of Rotherham County and Rotherham Town. In 1996 they won the Football League Trophy at Wembley, beating Shrewsbury Town 2–1, and they won it again in 2022. Since 2012 the Millers have played at the New York Stadium, built on the former Guest and Chrimes foundry site near the town centre. It is named after the New York area of the town, a name that surprises visitors who are expecting Manhattan. Before that, the club played at Millmoor from their formation in 1925 until 2008, then spent four seasons at Sheffield's Don Valley Stadium. Predecessor club Rotherham County had used Millmoor since 1907.