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Doncaster ( )BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names is a city in South Yorkshire, England. Named after the River Don, it is the administrative centre of the City of Doncaster metropolitan borough, and is the second largest settlement in South Yorkshire after Sheffield. Noted for its racing and railway history, it is situated in the Don Valley on the western edge of the Humberhead Levels and east of the Pennines. It had a population of 87,455 at the 2021 census, whilst its urban area had a population of 160,220, and the wider metropolitan borough had a population of 308,100.
Adjacent to Doncaster to its east is the Isle of Axholme in Lincolnshire, which contains the towns of Haxey, Epworth and Crowle, and directly south is Harworth Bircotes in Nottinghamshire. Also, within the city's vicinity are Barnsley, Wakefield, Pontefract, Selby, Goole, Scunthorpe, Gainsborough, Retford, Worksop and Rotherham, to which Doncaster is linked by road and rail.
As part of the Platinum Jubilee Civic Honours, Doncaster received city status by Letters Patent. A ceremony to confer city status took place at Mansion House on 9 November 2022 as part of a tour of Yorkshire by King Charles III and Queen Camilla.
Several areas of intense archaeological interest have been identified in the town, although many such as St Sepulchre Gate remain hidden under buildings. The Roman fort is thought to have lain on the site now taken by St George's Minster, beside the River Don. The Doncaster garrison units are named in a Register produced near the end of Roman rule in Britain: it was the home of the Crispinian Horse, presumably named after the tribes living near Crispiana in Pannonia Superior (near present-day Zirc in western Hungary), but possibly after Crispus, son of Constantine the Great, who was headquartered there while his father was based in nearby Eboracum. The Register names the unit as under the command of the "Dux Britanniarum".
In 1971 the Danum shield, a rectangular Roman shield dating to the 1st or 2nd century CE, was recovered from the site of the Danum fort.
An inscribed altar, dedicated to the Matres by Marcus Nantonius Orbiotalus, was found at St Sepulchre Gate in 1781. This was donated to the Yorkshire Museum in 1856.
With the 13th century, Doncaster matured into a busy town. In 1194 King Richard I granted it national recognition with a town charter. It suffered a disastrous fire in 1204, from which it slowly recovered. At the time, buildings were built of wood, and open fireplaces used for cooking and heating.
In 1248, a charter was granted for Doncaster Market to be held in the area surrounding the Church of St Mary Magdalene, which was built in Norman times. In the 16th century, the church was adapted for use as the town hall. It was finally demolished in 1846. Some 750 years on, the market continues to operate, with busy traders located under cover, at the 19th-century Doncaster Corn Exchange building (1873). The Corn Exchange was much rebuilt in 1994 after a major fire. During the 14th century, numerous friars arrived in Doncaster who were known for their religious enthusiasm and preaching. In 1307 the Franciscan friars () arrived, as did Carmelites (Whitefriars) in the mid-14th century. Other major medieval features included the Hospital of St Nicholas and the leper colony of the Hospital of St James, a moot hall, a grammar school and a five-arched stone town bridge with a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of the Bridge. By 1334, Doncaster was the wealthiest town in southern Yorkshire and the sixth in Yorkshire as a whole, even boasting its own banker. By 1379, it was recovering from the Black Death, which had reduced its population to 1,500. In October 1536, the Pilgrimage of Grace ended in Doncaster. This rebellion led by the lawyer Robert Aske commanded 40,000 Yorkshire people against Henry VIII, in protest at the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Many of Doncaster's streets are named with the suffix "-gate", after the old Danish word gata, meaning street. In medieval times, craftsmen or tradesmen with similar skills tended to live in the same street. Baxter is an ancient word for baker: Baxtergate was the bakers' street. Historians believe that Frenchgate may be named after French-speaking Normans who settled there.
The medieval township is known to have been protected by earthen ramparts and ditches, with four substantial gates as entrances to the town. These were located at Hall Gate, St Mary's Bridge (old), St Sepulchre Gate and Sunny Bar. Today the gates at Sunny Bar are commemorated by huge "Boar Gates"; similarly, the entrance to St Sepulchre Gate is commemorated by white marble "Roman Gates". The boundary of the town mainly extended from the Don along a route known now Market Road, Silver Street, Cleveland Street and Printing Office Street.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, Doncaster continued to expand, but it suffered several outbreaks of plague between 1562 and 1606. Each struck down significant numbers of victims.
During the First English Civil War, King Charles I marched by Bridgnorth, Lichfield and Ashbourne to Doncaster, where on 18 August 1645 he was met by numbers of Yorkshire gentlemen who had rallied to his cause. On 2 May 1664, Doncaster was rewarded with the title of Free Borough as a way for the King (Charles I's son, King Charles II) to express gratitude for the allegiance.
Doncaster was connected to the rail network in 1848 and a plant and carriage works for Great Northern Railway was constructed in the town in 1853.The Doncaster Carr rail depot was opened in 1876.Doncaster Carr Sheds, LNER Magazine 1927, p.387
The area to the east of Doncaster started developing settlements where coal miners lived from the 1850s onwards, exploiting coal near Barnsley. One such settlement is Deneby.
Doncaster and surrounding settlements became part of the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1899. Under the Local Government Act 1972 it was drawn into a new metropolitan borough in 1974 and became part of the new county of South Yorkshire.
Doncaster has traditionally been prosperous within the wapentake of Stafford and Tickhill.[2] Vision of Britain: Doncaster[3] Vision of Britain: Stafford and Tickhill Wapentake. The borough was known for rich landowners and huge stately homes such as Brodsworth Hall, Cantley Hall, Cusworth Hall, Hickleton Hall, Nether Hall and Wheatley Hall (demolished 1934). This wealth appears in the luxurious, historic gilded 18th-century Mansion House in High Street. This land ownership developed over what is an ancient market place and large buildings were erected in the 19th century, including the Doncaster Market and Corn Exchange. The old Doncaster Guildhall in Frenchgate was designed by John Butterfield with a tetrastyle portico and completed in 1847: it was demolished in the redevelopment of the 1960s.
Perhaps the most striking building to survive is St George's Minster, built in the 19th century and promoted from a parish church in 2004. Doncaster was already a communication centre by this time. It straddled the Great North Road or A1, gaining strategic importance, as this was the main route for traffic between London and Edinburgh.
From 2023, the Don Valley constituency will be renamed Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme, and will cover part of North Lincolnshire. A new Rawmarsh and Conisbrough constituency will be created covering the south-western suburbs of Doncaster and parts of Rotherham. Doncaster Central and Doncaster North will see minor boundary changes.
In September 2014, UKIP held an annual party conference at Doncaster Racecourse. UKIP party leader Nigel Farage claimed that by holding the conference in Doncaster, UKIP were "now parking our tanks on the Labour Party's lawn", referring to Labour leader Ed Miliband's Doncaster North constituency. Shortly afterwards in the seat, at the 2015 general election, UKIP won 8,928 votes to Labour's 20,708. In the 2016 membership referendum, 69 per cent of Doncaster voted to leave the European Union.
Additionally, the Metropolitan Borough of Doncaster is one of twelve districts in the United Kingdom to have a directly elected mayor, currently Ros Jones, who was re-elected in 2025.
Alongside seven other areas, Doncaster was announced to have succeeded in its bid to gain city status on 20 May 2022 as part of the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II. The city status applies to the whole metropolitan borough rather than just the built up area of Doncaster. Doncaster formally received the letters patent and became a city when a ceremony took place on 9 November 2022 as part of a royal visit.
The borough was reformed to become a municipal borough in 1836 under the Municipal Corporations Act 1835, which standardised how most boroughs operated across the country. The borough boundaries were enlarged several times, notably in 1914 when it absorbed Balby with Hexthorpe and Wheatley. By 1927 the borough was considered large enough to run its own county-level services, and so it was made a county borough, independent from West Riding County Council.
The county borough was abolished in 1974 and replaced by the larger Metropolitan Borough of Doncaster, which also took in the abolished urban districts of Adwick le Street, Bentley with Arksey, Conisbrough, Mexborough, Tickhill, the of Doncaster and Thorne, and (from Nottinghamshire) the parish of Finningley and part of the parish of Harworth (the latter being added to the parish of Bawtry). The borough was raised to city status in 2022.
| Capital city of the United Kingdom |
| Nearby city |
| Nearby city |
| Nearby city; historic county town of Yorkshire |
| Nearby city |
| Largest city in county; within combined authority area |
| Within combined authority area |
| Within combined authority area |
The Doncaster skyline is overlooked by the minster in the middle of the city. The Frenchgate Shopping Centre is in a similar position in the skyline, along with the Doncaster College Hub building.
After the old Doncaster College and surrounding buildings were demolished, the new Doncaster Civic Office designed by Cartwright Pickard was built for the City of Doncaster Council at a cost of £20million and completed in 2012.
Potteric Carr, including Potteric Carr Nature Reserve, lies to the south.
It surrounds the side of the urban area west of the East Coast Line, preventing suburbs such as Sprotbrough, New Edlington, Old Edlington, Scawsby and Rossington merging. As a result, open rural land can be very close to the town centre at some points (for example the wide undeveloped valley of the River Don is adjacent to the town centre), while at other points the urban sprawl rolls on for up to five miles. Another aim of the green belt is to encourage recreation and leisure interests, with rural landscape features, greenfield areas and facilities including the River Don and valley west of Hexthorpe; Hexthorpe Park; Cusworth Hall, museum and country park; Potteric Carr and Huxter Well Marsh; and the Trans Pennine Trail.
The Doncaster area is about as far north as the average July maximum temperature isotherm reaches. The nearby town of Bawtry, slightly further south, still holds the UK's September monthly record high temperature of , set in 1906. Typically, the warmest day of the year reaches and 12 or 13 days report a daytime maximum of or above.
The lowest known temperature is , set during December 1981. Online records only go back to 1960, and lower temperatures may have been recorded earlier. During the 1971–2000 period, an average of 51.9 nights of the year recorded an air frost.
Typically 106.9 days of the year report 1 mm or more of rainfall. Total annual precipitation is slightly below , which is comparable to the driest parts of the UK, due to Doncaster's location in the rain shadow of the Pennines.
| +Population of Doncaster 1801–2015 (1984). 9780116910615, HM Stationery office. ISBN 9780116910615
!1801
!1811
!1821
!1831
!1841
!1851
!1861
!1871
!1881
!1891
!1901
!1911
!1921
!1931
!1939
!1951
!1961
!1981
!2011
!2021 | |||||||||||||||||||
| 5,697 | 6,935 | 8,544 | 10,801 | 10,455 | 12,052 | 16,406 | 18,768 | 21,139 | 25,933 | 28,932 | 30,516 | 54,064 | 63,316 | 73,527 | 82,054 | 86,322 | 76,042 | 109,805 | 308,000 |
In the 2011 census the town of Doncaster (identified as the "built-up area subdivision") had a population of 109,805, while the wider "urban area" had a population of 158,141. The Metropolitan Borough of Doncaster had a 2011 population of 302,402, while a 2021 estimate was 308,000.
The 2011 census figure makes Doncaster's population very slightly larger than that of Rotherham (pop 109,691).
| 91.8% |
| 2.5% |
| 0.8% |
The Frenchgate Centre is a shopping centre and transport interchange. Opened in June 2006, it connects with the railway and bus stations. Lakeside Village, a retail outlet with some 45 retail shops and restaurants lies along the A6182 dual carriageway. The Waterdale area of the town centre is currently undergoing rejuvenation, with a new theatre (known as CAST), new civic offices and a new public square having been completed on the site of the Waterdale car park. The old council house and civic theatre have been demolished and new housing is being built in the town itself, opposite Doncaster Racecourse, and in out-of-town suburbs.
A large number of mining jobs were lost in the late 1980s. Today coal mining has ceased.
Rockware Glass is a specialist glass manufacturer. A production facility for chemical polymers was built in Wheatley Hall Road. It changed hands during its existence, until DuPont closed it in the mid-1990s.
Steel foundries, rolling mills and wire mills were built close to the railways that brought steel from Rotherham and Sheffield. Bridon Ropes produces wire rope, including the ropes used at coal mines to haul coal and miners. It is claimed to be the largest wire rope manufacturing plant in Europe. Bridon supplied wire rope for the Olympic Stadium for the 2012 Olympic Games.
During the First and Second World Wars, the town became involved in munitions manufacture.
The Doncaster Plant became famous for building LNER locomotives Flying Scotsman and Mallard, as well as many thousands more locomotives. By August 2008, most of the plant complex had been razed to make way for a very large housing development. As of 2023, the owner of what remains of the plant, Wabtec, performs the overhaul, maintenance and refurbishment of rail vehicles and associated components.
Today, Doncaster railway station is a principal stop and interchange on the East Coast Main Line; it is linked directly to towns and cities across the UK.
Doncaster PSB is one of the largest signalling centres on the UK network, controlling hundreds of route-miles of railway. Doncaster International Railport and Doncaster iPort are important road-rail intermodal terminals. The rail freight company DB Cargo UK has its headquarters in Doncaster.
Also nearby is one of the two National College for Advanced Transport and Infrastructure campuses that specialises in courses relating to the railways and transport systems.
During the First World War, fighters based first on the racecourse, then at a temporary airstrip near Finningley (later RAF Finningley and now Doncaster Sheffield Airport) and finally, in 1916, on a newly built airfield alongside the racecourse, were deployed to defend the east coast against . On several occasions fighters took off to search for intruders but none were ever seen. The Royal Flying Corps station trained pilots for the war in France. Within months of the war ending the station was put up for sale and two of its three Belfast hangars, the same type that now forms the basis for the Royal Air Force Museum at Hendon, were sold to a Sheffield motor manufacturing company for storage and assembly at Finningley. The third of the hangars stayed in place, mainly housing buses, until the 1970s, when it was knocked down and replaced with modern buildings.
In 1920, the government asked local authorities to assist in forming a chain of airfields for civil air services. Doncaster, with expert advice from Alan Cobham, opened its aviation centre on 26 May 1934. Development of the airfield continued and on 1 July 1936 an international service was opened to Amsterdam. On 1 November 1938, after discussions with the Air Ministry, 616 (South Yorkshire) Squadron of the Royal Auxiliary Air Force was formed. Shortly after the outbreak of war in 1939 the squadron went to its battle station and played a part in the Battle of Britain. After the departure of 616 squadron, its place was taken by the formation of 271 (Transport) Squadron composed mainly of requisitioned civilian aircraft and obsolescent twin-engined bombers. 616 squadron was the first Allied jet fighter squadron, equipped with the Gloster Meteor, famed for using their wingtips to throw German V-1 flying bombs off course. In 1944, after being equipped with American-made Douglas DC-3 Dakotas, the squadron moved south to take part in Operation Overlord and later in the airborne invasion at Arnhem, where Flight Lieutenant David Lord was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.
After the war the airfield reverted to civilian flying, and finally closed in 1992.
In 2000, the factory was purchased by ARGO SpA, an Italian-based agricultural equipment builder. Doncaster was the sole production site of the McCormick Tractors brand, and the factory employed around 380 people (although about 1,100 people are employed in the worldwide McCormick group). In December 2006, the parent company, ARGO Spa, announced that the Doncaster facility would close in 2007, with the loss of around 325 jobs. The announcement was made only a week before Christmas. Sixty-one years of tractor production in Doncaster ended in 2007.
The South Yorkshire Aircraft Museum (formerly AeroVenture) is based on the old site of RAF Doncaster at Doncaster Lakeside. The Trolleybus Museum in the nearby village of Sandtoft specialises in preserving , and claims to have the largest collection of them in Europe, with over 60 examples. Markham Grange Steam Museum, in a garden centre in the nearby village of Brodsworth, has a private collection of steam engines. Ashworth Barracks Museum is a military museum in Balby telling the story of the men awarded the Victoria Cross. It also houses a First World War exhibit including a "Weekers Helmet", one of only two known that exist in the UK.
Since 1973, Doncaster has been the home of the Doncaster Youth Jazz Association (DYJA). Founded by John Ellis, DYJA has been a training ground for generations of amateur and professional jazz musicians including, Andy Cato (of Groove Armada), Dennis Rollins, John Escreet, Nadim Teimoori and Reuben Fowler.
In 1956, Tish the goldfish was won at a funfair in Doncaster. Tish lived till the age of 43 becoming the world's oldest known goldfish.
The station is served by seven train operating companies:
Doncaster is situated on the A1(M) and M18 motorways, within 20 minutes of the key M1 and M62 motorways. The A1(M) motorway bypass cost £6 million and was opened by Ernest Marples in 1961. The former route is now the A638 and partly the A614 to Blyth.
New developments include campus facilities for Doncaster College and the Frenchgate Interchange, a unification of bus and railway stations with the Frenchgate Centre. The extension to the shopping centre and the new bus station opened on 8 June 2006, when all Doncaster bus routes started to use the station.
BBC Radio Sheffield and Hits Radio South Yorkshire (formerly Hallam FM) also broadcast to the city.
Sine FM is a community radio station broadcasting to Doncaster's central business district and inner suburbs on FM. TMCR 95.3 is a community radio station based in Thorne serving North East Doncaster on FM.
Doncaster Knights currently play in rugby union's RFU Championship, with their home at Castle Park.
Doncaster is also home to one of England's most successful and historic women's clubs, Doncaster Rovers Belles, who play fixtures between the Eco-Power Stadium and Chesterfield Poultry Stadium. The club had, until recent years, a long tradition of providing England internationals and was a founder member of the FA WSL.
Doncaster also played host to England's women for their multi-record breaking 20–0 win over Latvia in a European qualifier for the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup.
Doncaster has a men's basketball team called the Doncaster Danum Eagles who compete in National League Division 2. Doncaster additionally has an American football team called the Doncaster Mustangs, who are in Division 1 of the British American Football League.
The town also has regular involvement in the Tour de Yorkshire cycling event, having the finish line of stage two, of the 2016 Tour de Yorkshire hosted in Doncaster, as well as the finish line of stage one of the 2018 Tour de Yorkshire hosted in the town as well.
Several roads in the Lakeside area are named after Doncaster's twin towns, such as Gliwice Way, Herten Way, Wilmington Drive and Carolina Way, named after the state where Wilmington lies.
Doncaster was formerly twinned with Ozyorsk, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia. This ceased following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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