Fitzwilliam, West Yorkshire
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| Fitzwilliam | |
  Fitzwilliam shown within West Yorkshire |
|
| Population | 6,160 |
|---|---|
| OS grid reference | |
| Metropolitan borough | City of Wakefield |
| Metropolitan county | West Yorkshire |
| Region | Yorkshire and the Humber |
| Constituent country | England |
| Sovereign state | United Kingdom |
| Post town | PONTEFRACT |
| Postcode district | WF9 |
| Dialling code | 01977 |
| Police | West Yorkshire |
| Fire | West Yorkshire |
| Ambulance | Yorkshire |
| European Parliament | Yorkshire and the Humber |
| UK Parliament | Hemsworth |
| List of places: UK • England • Yorkshire | |
Fitzwilliam is a small village on the edge of West Yorkshire, England. It is located in the City of Wakefield district, to the west of Hemsworth. Like most of this district, it was an old coal-mining area, although Fitzwilliam has yet to fully recover from the effect of pit closures.
The village was originally built to provide housing for miners at the colliery that was originally named "Fitzwilliam Main".[1] It later changed its name to "Hemsworth colliery" and then merged with "South Kirkby" colliery in 1969. Other nearby mines were "Kinsley" and "Nostell", which closed in 1986 and 1987 respectively. "South Kirkby" colliery closed in 1988.
The huge levels of migration out of the village earned it the label of a ghost town. Over the last five years, a very large proportion of the village has been demolished, including the whole of the "City" estate,[2] due to the dominance of derelict properties; fortunes are now starting to improve. Unemployment is high, although not as high as it once was. In response to this situation, Fitzwilliam is included in a special regeneration area and has received special funding to aid its recovery. It has a railway station on the Wakefield line, providing it with connections to Leeds, Wakefield, Doncaster and Sheffield.
Its most notable sons are Geoffrey Boycott, the cricketer, and Cyril Knowles, the late soccer player. The band Chumbawumba recorded a song named after the village, which described its painful decline following the 1984-85 miners' strike. The village also plays a large role in the crime novel Nineteen Seventy Four, in which it is introduced in a list of "hard towns for hard men" and then later referred to as "a dirty brown mining town" and "where the night comes early and nowt feels right, where the kids kill cats and the men kill kids".
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