| Willington | |
St Michael's parish church |
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Willington
Willington shown within Derbyshire |
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| Population | 2,604 (2001 census)[1] |
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| OS grid reference | SK2928 |
| Parish | Willington |
| District | South Derbyshire |
| Shire county | Derbyshire |
| Region | East Midlands |
| Country | England |
| Sovereign state | United Kingdom |
| Post town | Derby |
| Postcode district | DE65 |
| Dialling code | 01283 |
| Police | Derbyshire |
| Fire | Derbyshire |
| Ambulance | East Midlands |
| EU Parliament | East Midlands |
| UK Parliament | South Derbyshire |
| Website | Willington Parish Council |
| List of places: UK • England • Derbyshire | |
Willington is a village and civil parish in South Derbyshire, England. The 2001 Census recorded a parish population of 2,604.[1]
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Willington is on the River Trent about 6 miles (10 km) southwest of Derby. The parish is within 0.5 miles (800 m) of the Staffordshire county boundary and the village is about 5 miles (8 km) northeast of Burton upon Trent.
The village is at the crossroads of the north – south B5008 road (for Findern, Repton and Winshill), and the east – west A5132 road (formerly the B5009, linking Hilton and Swarkestone). The A5132 carried a lot of Nottingham – Stoke-on-Trent traffic before the A50 road was opened in September 1997.
The toponym Willington is derived from the Old English tun (homestead or farm) among the willows.[2] In the Domesday Book, the village is called Willetune or Willentune, and the land was held by Ralph Fitzhubert[2][3] and was an agricultural village on the flood plain of the Trent. The village is recorded as Wilintun in about 1150 and as Wyliton in 1230.[2]
In the 17th century Willington became the highest navigable port on the Trent. It first began to grow from a population of 477 with the construction of the Trent and Mersey Canal in 1777, the same year Bass beer in Burton was started, at which time it became a small inland port and a village with four public houses: The Railway (which was later demolished), The Rising Sun, The Green Man and The Green Dragon, all selling locally brewed beers from Burton upon Trent for the many Irish canal navvies.
The railway was built in 1838, the station being called Repton and Willington and brought the scholars to nearby Repton School. The main-line station was closed in 1964 but a new station was opened in the 1990s as part of the (incomplete) Ivanhoe Line project to link Leicester and Burton-on-Trent and runs mainline trains to Derby, Birmingham and beyond. The village's population increased to 708 by 1940. Trentside Cottage, Bargate Lane is the oldest cottage in the village. A 200-year-old Cedar of Lebanon[4] lies on the site of the now-demolished Potlocks Farm, on Twyford Road in the village. The bridge over the Trent was opened on August 7 1839, being the only one between Swarkestone and Burton.
In 1995 Willington railway station was re-opened at a cost of £565,000 funded by the EU.
A former cheese factory in 1920 became a reclaimed aluminium processing plant in 1964 dominating the southern part of the village for twenty years and it was hoped that aluminium car engines would be made nearby for the Toyota Manufacturing U.K. (TMUK). The site is now closed and the land for sale.
Due to the opening of the nearby Toyota car factory (on the A38/A50) in 1992 between Willington (on the former Derby airfield at Burnaston) and Findern, the village has prospered and expanded since the 1980s.
Local shops include a post office and newsagent, florist, Co-op supermarket, delicatessen, wools and yarns, beautician, hairdresser, hardware and DIY, general store, pharmacist, a Chinese take-away and the three pubs mentioned above.
Willington has an engineering firm, a large GP practice, a Church of England parish church and Baptist Chapel[5] and the SOON Ministries literature charity, a large modern primary school and nearby in Etwall (within Willington's catchment area) an expanding secondary school, John Port School.
In the 1950s, two coal-fired power stations were built on a site off Twyford Road, between Willington and Findern. The stations were privatised and sold to National Power in the early 1990s and eventually closed in the mid 1990s. Although most of the stations were demolished at the turn of the millennium, the five cooling towers continue to dominate the skyline of the local area. The site[6] is earmarked for a large residential development, pending the results of a public inquiry. The construction plans have been met with local opposition, perhaps due to the site's proximity to the River Trent's flood plain.
In the mid 1990s a pair of peregrine falcons nested in one of the site's huge cooling towers. Unlike many bird of prey breeding sites, this was widely publicised because of its impregnable location.
Blue Bus Services operated a depot on Repton Road from 1922, but almost entire Blue Buses fleet was destroyed by a fire at the depot on 5 January 1976. The Saxon Grove residential estate was built on the site in the late 1980s.
John Wetton of rock band Asia was born in Willington in 1949.
Part of the former ARC owned (and back-filled with the power station waste ash) gravel pits at the southern edge of the village adjacent to the River Trent has now become a wetland nature reserve managed by the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust and developed with the aid of the Environment Agency.
The geographic coordinates are from the Ordnance Survey.
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