A few Views
Penistone's streets were named and houses numbered in November 1881. The house numbering system was logical, being always odd on one side of the road and even on the other side. The numbers start from the house nearest to the town centre. Some houses also have names. From the 1970s, a unique postcode was given to each group of about six houses.
Postcodes in our area used to begin with 'S30' but this was later changed to 'S36' (see 'Streetlist') and now includes such as Stocksbridge, Deepcar, Langsett, Midhopestones, Ingbirchworth, Thurgoland, Dunford Bridge and, erm, Wigtwizzle (no, me neither). Roads and street lights are council-maintained, although there are still a few 'unadopted roads', such as part of Talbot Road. Most homes are owner-occupied (mortgaged or fully-owned), although there are still pockets of social housing run by housing associations and quite a number of privately rented homes.
The 'Neighbourhood Watch' signs might fade with time but Penistone people usually know their neighbours quite well, as local people tend not to move house often, and they would not miss much of what happens on their street. This could be England's centre of twitching curtains - and the local 'grapevine' has always been efficient. More so with the addition of social media. Penistone is also very quiet at night; almost completely silent in places away from the main roads. It is not uncommon to hear geese flying overhead in their vee formations.
Cyber-travellers might like to compare their streets with those of Penistone from these pages. Here are some for you to visit:
Penistone houses are normally made of red brick, Yorkshire stone or are stone-faced. We don't have any wooden houses here. The red-bricked houses shown in the picture above are on Victoria Street and all of them used to be council-owned. These days they will be private-owned following the 'right to buy' scheme of the 1970s; or possibly rented out by private owners. Most houses have some garden even if it is just a small patch at the front of the older terraced houses. The larger gardens will usually have a lawn with flowers around the sides and some gardens can be quite magnificent. Town centre roads often have hanging baskets with rather over-sized sponsorship notices attached to diminish their beauty. Most parts of town will have green spaces and play areas for children, with slides and such-like; what used to be called 'recreation grounds' or simply 'Recs' in the old days. The old playground equipment used to be fairly dangerous and each part would have been on a concrete base. Imagine a child being flung off a roundabout at speed to land on that! I wonder how many remember 'The Swagger' next to the bowling green. These mollycoddled days require much safer kit, and rubberised landings.
The largest recreation area is 'The Showground' which was designated on 17th April 2014 by the Royal 'Field in Trust' scheme to protect green spaces from ever being built upon. It is now designated a 'Queen Elizabeth II Playing Field' which is maintained by Barnsley Council and is used for: galas, gymkhana events, races, the community bonfire on Guy Fawkes night and particularly the annual Penistone Agricultural Show. The Show Committee actually owns fields higher up. Another notable green space is 'Watermeadows Park' off Wentworth Road which is often used for picnics, ball games and by dog-walkers. It is notable for including Penistone Viaduct, which supports the railway line to Huddersfield and serves as a natural border between town and country.
Most telephone cables and utilities (water, gas, electricity and sewage) are placed under the pavements and roads, with 'manhole' covers placed here and there. When this page was last edited in 2018, it said that: 'There are still a few 'telegraph poles' around with overhead telephone wires' suggesting that there not many of them. This radically changed in 2024 with a scheme to extend broadband internet using optical fibre. Now the streets are quite cluttered with very tall wooden poles and they are not always dead vertical (within 5° is acceptable - to them). The other poles you see are road signs and the street lights which these days are LED lights instead of the older, orange-coloured sodium vapour lamps. They are not quite as bright as the sodium lights but produce a more natural, if blue-ish, white light. They also save energy costs for the borough council.
There are no electrical transformers fastened to houses as they have in the USA and no external letter boxes as nearly every front door will have a letterbox flap. Post boxes in the street (collection points for letters) are usually the familiar bright-red pillar boxes or wall-mounted Royal Mail boxes. Fire hydrants are hidden under pavements with an accompanying 'H' sign nearby giving the distance to the hydrant. Other familiar 'street furniture' of recent years are olive green metal boxes cointaining the wiring for telephones.
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I can offer inspiration for new road names based on notable local names, such as: Vicars (Turnbull), Schoolteachers (Andrews, Punt, Simms), Benefactors (Carnegie), Companies (Brown, Durrans, Gittus, Hoyland, Winterbottom), local features; (Arches, Windmills, Iron Bridge, Hartcliff View, Weathervane). Of course, we might now include, er, Penistone websites (Briggs, Gibbins, Hillman, Lavender, Mitchell).
"Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak."