New Silksworth

New Tunstall (now Silksworth) is the village serving Londonderry's Silksworth colliery, which opened in 1873. 

The nine streets and 350 houses, built 1868-74, form a classic colliery settlement. Overmen’s houses, with five rooms, and sinkers’ dwellings, were separate from the rest. The remainder divided into three classes, ranging from two rooms with pantry and yard, to four ground floor rooms, all built to a uniform plan. As an experiment, 26 were built of cement. The village was well laid out and drained, every house had a garden, usually to the front, and there were various community buildings: schools (1876), a Primitive Methodist chapel (1877) and Volunteer Drill hall (1883). The miners’ union built the Miners’ Hall, at the centre of the village, in 1893.