HUNDREDS of people gathered in Yorkshire’s Worsbrough at the weekend for the unveiling of a memorial paying tribute to industries that have now disappeared from the district.

The memorial comprises a dissected pit wheel, a miner, a glassblower and a plinth built from Staffordshire bricks used in the construction of railway bridges and viaducts.

Worsbrough — a town just outside of Barnsley — was originally a cluster of agricultural hamlets and villages. It was transformed by the industrial revolution.

At its peak it had 22 coal mines, a glassworks, chemical works, quarries, lime kilns, foundries, boat-building and nail-making factories, paper mill, weaving sheds, bobbin mill, iron smelter and even a gunpowder mill. All are now gone.

Worsbrough Industrial and Social History Society worked for four years to fund and create the memorial to the district’s former industrial workers.

National Union of Mineworkers Yorkshire Area chairman Chris Skidmore told the gathering that the district’s industries had been inter-dependent.

“The pits could not have been sunk without engineering skills, the steel industry, the workers who made the tools,” he said.

Unite Community regional organiser John Coyne said the union was taking trades unionism back into the heart of communities like Worsbrough.

He went on to attack the injustice of police watchdog IPCC’s refusal to investigate the officers’ attack on miners at Orgreave in 1984.

“Injustice runs through this government like a stick of Blackpool rock,” he said.