Dewsbury

Dewsbury is a town in the county of West Yorkshire, England, to the west of Wakefield, in the borough of Kirklees. It lies by the River Calder and the Calder and Hebble Navigation. After undergoing a period of major growth in the 19th century Dewsbury has more recently gone under a period of decline.

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Dewsbury was one of the centres for the "shoddy" industry, the recycling of old woollen items by mixing them with new wool and making them into heavy blankets and uniforms.

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The town now has a large Asian community - making up around 30% of the town's population. Savile Town and Ravensthorpe are populated mainly by people of Indian and Pakistani origin. Other areas of the town are mainly white, such as Chickenley. Race relations have been volatile at time, but there have been no major disturbances. Local elections in 1999 sparked controversy, when it appeared that a section of the Asian community in Ravensthorpe had arranged so that several dead voters were down as having voted Labour, but the police abandoned the investigation. The BNP has often polled around 15-35% of the vote in the town's wards, but have yet to win a seat. The British centre of the Islamic missionary organisation Tablighi Jamaat is located in Dewsbury.

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The town is listed as one of the most deprived areas of West Yorkshire by the government and the E.U. has made Dewsbury and its neighbour Batley into a "transformation zone". Some of the worst problems include housing, education and unemployment. Official government statistics estimate that almost a third of the houses in the town lack central heating.

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There is a rugby league team who play in National League 2 - Dewsbury Rams. They play on Owl Lane, towards Ossett, on the site of the old Savile & Shaw Cross colliery. Their original and famous ground Crown Flatts stood on Leeds Road at Hanging Heaton for many years until it was burned down by arsonists in the late 1980's. It has been replaced with a modern housing estate.

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The town centre is starting to see a revival, and large retailers such as Sainsbury's and Halford's are soon to be joined by Next. The local market is also enjoying something of a revival, having been established since mediaeval times.

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The Reverend Patrick Bront?, the father of Anne Bront?, Charlotte Bront? and Emily Bront?, was rector of the parish church here.

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Dewsbury was also the birth place of British Actress Rebecca Callard and former Speaker of the British House of Commons, Betty Boothroyd.

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The actor Patrick Stewart was also born in nearby Mirfield and recently appeared on Friday the 4th of April 2003 in Dewsbury Town Hall to raise money for charity.

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More recently in the news is that Dewsbury was the home town of Mohammad Sidique Khan, one of the suspected bombers in the 7 July 2005 attacks on the London Underground. He is beleived to have detonated the Edgware Road Tube Station bomb which helped to bring destruction and chaos to the capital.

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Local attractions include the National Coal Mining Museum and Bagshaw Museum in neighbouring town, Batley.

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County: Originally, in continental Europe, a county was the land under the jurisdiction of a count. Counts are called "earls" in post-Celtic Great Britain and Ireland - the term is from Old Norse jarl and was introduced by the Vikings - but there is no correlation between "county" and "earldom." Rather, t...

West Yorkshire: West Yorkshire is a metropolitan county in England, corresponding roughly to the core of the West Riding of the traditional county of Yorkshire. It borders on Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Derbyshire, North Yorkshire and South Yorkshire....

England: :For an explanation of often confusing terms like England, (Great) Britain and United Kingdom see British Isles (terminology)....