Doncaster’s history stretches back nearly two thousand years but the modern town has little in the way of physical heritage. Few northern settlements affected by industrialisation have retained many buildings from earlier periods besides their parish churches, but a disastrous fire in 1853 robbed Doncaster of even that building and its evidence of antiquity. Eighteenth- and 20th-century redevelopments further depleted the slender legacy of buildings the town had acquired, yet there remains much of interest and value, not least in the spine that runs from the racecourse to the civic mansion house, which alerts both resident and visitor to the historic status of the town. This new comprehensive telling of the Doncaster story is based, therefore, on written records covering most of the last millennium. The small community determined to assert its independence in the Middle Ages withstood poverty, plague and civil war in the age of the Tudors and Stuarts, and became the centre of a rural area which it served as market town for centuries.

Over the last 150 years, if not before, this district has experienced changes as radical as those that have affected Doncaster, becoming a largely industrial area following the rapid growth of the industrial town. The increasing prosperity of 18th-century England gave rise to greater leisure opportunities, and for over 200 years Doncaster’s September race meeting has featured the St Leger, one of the oldest classics of the English turf. To the Victorians, and for more than a century afterwards, Doncaster was renowned as a railway town, and its engineering works produced some of the icons of the Age of Steam. In the 20th century it was a boom town of the Yorkshire coalfield and latterly one of the provinces of the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire. With an appropriate emphasis on the changing ways in which local people have sought to govern themselves, Brian Barber tells the story of everyday life in a northern town.