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Story of Spital
An Illustrated History of a Chesterfield Suburb
by Lyn Pardo Roques
Immediately to the east of Chesterfield town centre, on the opposite side of the main railway line that skirts the town, lies a small community that takes its name from a leper hospital founded just outside the borough in the late twelfth century. The hospital was swept away by Henry VIII but, as in many towns, the name survived and was applied initially to a gentry residence built near the site of the hospital. In the early nineteenth century various small industries were established alongside the river Rother at Spital, and from about 1870 a new residential suburb grew up along Spital Lane and on a grid of new streets nearby. A mission church, which for a time was also used as an infant school, was opened in 1895, dedicated, like the leper hospital, to St Leonard, and in the early twentieth century an order of Anglican Sisters had a house at Spital. The community grew further after the Second World War, with more house-building on Spital Lane. It has recently expanded again with the creation of the Riverside Village estate on the site of Markham & Company's engineering works.
