Fitzwilliam, West Yorkshire

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Fitzwilliam
Fitzwilliam shown within West Yorkshire
Population	6,160
OS grid reference	SE413152
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

Coordinates: 53°37′57″N 1°22′32″W / 53.63249, -1.37556

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".