Mexborough and Swinton Times, July 23, 1937

Value as Shopping Centre.

As a shopping centre for the immediate district, Mexborough has always held a high place, and despite the improved transport facilities there has been little change in that respect in the last sixty years, as a walk down packed High Street on Saturday night will readily testify.

An attractive market may have done a good deal to maintain Mexborough’s popularity as a shopping centre. In 1880 the Local Board built the Market Hall, in which the Urban Council Offices are at present situated and this building, though at first regarded with suspicion by the local shopkeepers, did more good than harm to town trade. Denaby, Goldthorpe, Swinton, Wath, and Wombwell all have their markets, most of them being established after Mexborough’s, but they have never diverted much of the patronage which the older establishment enjoys.

In the last twenty years of the nineteenth century Mexborough’s growth was towards the west, and over what is still known as the Common. This section is almost wholly built up and post war developments have therefore of necessity followed a different direction. First a big housing estate grew up to the east of Adwick Road and north of Doncaster Road, and this has subsequently been considerably extended in a northerly and north-easterly direction. Development to the south is barred by the river, canal, and railway, and the assimilation of Old Denaby, at one time regarded as a potential suburb of Mexborough, seems less likely than ever, following the ministerial findings as a result of the review of County District Boundaries. Old Denaby has always been part of the ecclesiastical parish of Mexborough, but it would seem that no closer link is likely to be established, at any rate for some time to come.