Blidworth Library, July 2023. Picture Source: Paul Fillingham.
Blidworth Library
Following investment from the Libraries Improvement Fund, Blidworth Library reopened in 2023 with a fresh stock of books and resources. The local history section details the development of the village, including its folklore, medieval past and the development of the model village for Blidworth Colliery in the early 1920s.
Blidworth library has an extensive selection of local history books and pamphlets.
The Blidworth Colliery Village trail covers the location to the east of the original village, developed in the inter-war period, between 1924 and 1927 by the Newstead Colliery Company to attract miners to the new mine.
The construction of the model village was well planned, and mineworkers’ families were catered for with generous gardens and civic amenities, including a school, sports fields, a medical centre, allotments, churches, and public houses.
Blidworth was no stranger to the effects of industrialisation. James Prior’s novel Forest Folk, published in 1901, having documented the life of villagers as they grappled with the arrival of textile frames that were moved out of Nottingham’s mills after the luddite riots of 1811. You can learn about this earlier period in the companion trail Robin Hood’s Blidworth.
Blidworth library contains several versions of James Prior’s Forest Folk. This edition, funded by UNESCO was published by Spokesman Press in 2016.
New Colliery at Blidworth
At the time of the sinking of the new colliery, local newspapers expressed fears about the influx of miners into this deeply conservative agricultural area. As the Newark Advertiser put it ‘an influx of alien folk… in thought and tradition, in outlook and purpose to the natives and rural folk amongst whom they have set themselves down.’
…colliery workers have invaded the village and the undefiled air of the parish has been polluted with Bolshevic talk.
The following appeared under the heading ‘New Colliery at Blidworth’ in the Mansfield Reporter, 7th March 1924. ‘It was said that probably before the builders left the village they would erect 2,000 houses.
That means an enormous change for the quaint old-world village of Blidworth, with its centuries-old rocking service’.
In the past, the village has been regarded as purely agricultural, although of late years, since the coal pits have sprung up-or should it not be sprung down?- the colliery workers have invaded the village and the undefiled (pure) air of the parish has been polluted with Bolshevic talk.
Next
Head along New Lane, down the steep hill from the Library and turn left when you reach the intersection with Mansfield Road.