Phoenix Row incorporating Belts Gill and Softley Dene Farm (formerly Glebe Farm) is a tiny village of about 30 houses in County Durham, in England. It is situated half a mile north of Low Etherley and 2.5 miles west of Bishop Auckland. It was built on the abandoned line of George Stephenson's original Etherley Incline railway, designed to haul coal by static steam engine from the Witton Park collieries to join the locomotive-driven section of the Stockton & Darlington Railway at Shildon in 1825. As such it has a visible but largely unrecognised importance in railway history.
The hamlet of Phoenix Row was built in the 1840s, originally of local sandstone, Stobart brick and red pantiles to house families of miners and farmworkers. Nearby Witton Park Iron Works also provided some employment until its closure. The people of Phoenix Row built their own Methodist Chapel (now a private house) and they had a cricket team which played at the New Inn Fields. Phoenix Row's bracing climate was credited in the local press for breeding tall, strong sportsmen - "sturdy six-footers". At one time the majority of the houses in the hamlet were occupied by members of just three families - Watsons, Grays and Stubbs - and their in-laws.
In the 1960s Phoenix Row was threatened with the dreaded Category "D" notice, a death sentence for many post-industrial County Durham mining communities. However the determined villagers fought the Category "D" notice tooth and nail. Showing remarkable community spirit, they united under the banner of P.R.I.D.E. (the Phoenix Row Improvement & Development Effort) and succeeded in getting the Category D threat lifted, modernising their homes and saving their village for future generations.
Famous quotes containing the words phoenix and/or row:
“And there’s a score of duchesses, surpassing womankind,
Or who have found a painter to make them so for pay
And smooth out stain and blemish with the elegance of his mind:
I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“all afternoon
Their witless offspring flock like piped rats to its siren
Crescendo, and agape on the crumbling ridge
Stand in a row and learn.”
—William Stanley Merwin (b. 1927)