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Local area guide
Skip hire in Ashington
Ashington is a town in Northumberland, sitting on the River Wansbeck around 15 miles north of Newcastle, with a population of around 28,000. It was a farming hamlet of a few dozen people until 1867, when the Ashington Coal Company sank its first pit, and within fifty years the town had grown into what was often described as the largest mining village in the world. The colliery rows built to house the workforce ran in long parallel terraces across the site, and at its peak the Ashington complex employed many thousands of men underground.
Ashington's mining culture produced something unusual. The Ashington Group, better known as the Pitmen Painters, formed in 1934 when a group of miners enrolled in a Workers' Educational Association art appreciation class and began painting the world they knew. Their work, showing pit life, allotments and the town's streets, gained national and then international recognition, and the story was dramatised by Lee Hall in the play The Pitmen Painters. A permanent collection of their paintings is held at Woodhorn Museum, housed in the former Woodhorn Colliery on the edge of town, whose surviving winding gear and buildings form one of the best-preserved pit heads in the country.
The town is also famous for football. Ashington produced Jackie Milburn, the Newcastle United and England centre forward, and the brothers Bobby and Jack Charlton, both World Cup winners in 1966 — an extraordinary concentration of talent from one small town, rooted in the pit welfare grounds and street football of the colliery rows.
Ashington sits on the A189 spine road with the A1 a short distance west, giving links to Newcastle in around half an hour. The town regained a passenger railway station in 2024 when the Northumberland Line reopened, restoring direct services to Newcastle after nearly sixty years. Neighbouring communities include Newbiggin-by-the-Sea, Bedlington, Blyth, Morpeth and Pegswood, with the Northumberland coast and Druridge Bay a few miles east.
Housing in Ashington is dominated by the colliery terraces, laid out in the long numbered and lettered rows that still define the street pattern, alongside interwar and post-war council-built estates at Hirst and Seaton Hirst and more recent development on the edges. Property is among the most affordable in the north-east, which supports an active buy-to-let and renovation market, and the town has been the focus of sustained regeneration investment since the last pit closed in 1988, including work on the town centre, the Wansbeck riverside and former colliery land.






