Leycett railway station

Scot Hay is a hamlet located outside the town of Newcastle-under-lyme, Staffordshire, England. It is located near Keele University and also the villages of Silverdale and Keele The village cricket team rejoined the weekend Stone and District League in 2016 after an absence of ten years.

Leycett was a small mining village in Staffordshire in the Borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme which was built in the late eighteen sixties to accommodate the miners and their families. Population details as taken at the 2011 census can be found under Madeley with the name Leycett meaning 'the clearing in the woods'.

Keele railway station is a disused railway station in Staffordshire, England. The Stoke to Market Drayton Line was opened by the North Staffordshire Railway (NSR) in 1870. The station, then called Keele Road, was opened on the same day as the line opened. In 1898 the station was renamed Keele. The line through the station was singled in 1934 and the number of platforms reduced to one but the line through the disused platform was retained as a passing loop for goods trains.Passenger traffic at the station was withdrawn in 1956 and goods traffic was withdrawn in January 1967 when the station closed altogether. The line through the station remained in use until the closure of Silverdale Colliery in 1998.

The Minnie Pit disaster was a coal mining accident that took place on 12 January 1918 in Halmer End, Staffordshire, in which 155 men and boys died. The disaster, which was caused by an explosion due to firedamp, is the worst ever recorded in the North Staffordshire Coalfield. An official investigation never established what caused the ignition of flammable gases in the pit.

The Hollywood Music Festival was held at Leycett in an area called Hollywood on the grounds of Ted Askey's Lower (pig) Farm at Finney Green, between Silverdale and Leycett, near Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, England, on 23 and 24 May 1970. It was notable for the first performance of Grateful Dead in the UK and also for the performance of Jose Feliciano and Mungo Jerry, and featured such notable bands as Free, Ginger Baker's Air Force, Colosseum, Family, Black Sabbath and Traffic. The company responsible for the festival was Onista Ltd, who promptly went bankrupt unable to pay festival staff. Onista was an offshoot of Eliot Cohen's Red Bus company, with Ellis Elias and Elliot Cohen as the promoters.

Halmer End is a small village in the Borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire, neighbouring the small hamlet of Alsagers Bank and the larger village of Audley. Population details as taken in the 2011 census can be found under Audley Rural. The village is on the B5367. Historically, the village was dominated by the Coal Mining Industry, and several large coal mines were in operation in the vicinity of the village in the 19th and early 20th centuries. However, the village is remembered as being the site of the worst mining disaster in the history of the North Staffordshire Coalfield when, in 1918, 156 men and boys were killed in the Minnie Pit Disaster. Nowadays, the village remains semi-rural and residential with a school, convenience store and a Chinese takeaway.

Halmerend railway station (sometimes referred to as Halmer End) is a disused railway station in Staffordshire, England. The station was situated on the North Staffordshire Railway (NSR) Audley branch line. The Audley line ran from a junction on the Stoke to Crewe line near Alsager to a junction between Keele and Madeley Road on the Stoke to Market Drayton Line Like many of the lines opened by the NSR the Audley line was built primarily to carry mineral traffic. The line opened in 1870 but passenger services were not introduced until 1880, partially a wait caused by the need to build a junction from the Audley line that would allow trains to run directly towards Stoke rather than having to reverse at the junction which was how the line was originally constructed.The decision to introduce passenger trains over the line led to the opening of a station to serve the mining village of Halmer End in June 1880. By 1923 the station had a good passenger service, for a small country station, with six services a day in each direction from Stoke on Trent, three terminating at Halmerend and the others continuing to Harecastle.Good as the passenger service was the rise in bus services led to a decline in the revenue raised from passengers and in 1931 the London, Midland and Scottish Railway withdrew all passenger services on the Audley line from 27 April 1931.Freight traffic too had been diminished by the economic depression towards the end of the 1920s and many of the local collieries closed as they became worked out or uneconomic to maintain and the line was reduced to a single line in 1933 although freight services continued until complete closure of the line through Halmerend in June 1962.

Alsagers Bank is a village in the Borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire. Population details at the 2011 census can be found under Audley Rural. It has a pub, The Gresley Arms, St John's Church (Church of England), a primary school, and a football club. There is a regular bus service through the village between Newcastle-under-Lyme and Audley. The village bears no relationship to Alsager in Cheshire and its name is a derivation from the Alsager family who lived in the area.

Sir Thomas Boughey Academy (formerly Sir Thomas Boughey High School) is a co-educational secondary school located in Halmer End (near Newcastle-under-Lyme) in Staffordshire, England. Its current headteacher is Mrs J. Hingley. The school is named after Sir Thomas Boughey of the Boughey baronets who donated land for the establishment of the school. The school can trace its origins to 1849.Today it is an academy administered by the Windsor Academy Trust. The school offers GCSEs as programmes of study for pupils. The school was rated GOOD in the 2022 OFSTED inspection

Newcastle-under-Lyme is a constituency in northern Staffordshire created in 1354 and represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament since 2019 by Aaron Bell of the Conservative Party. It was the last to be co-represented by a member of the Conservative Party when it was dual-member, before the 1885 general election which followed the Redistribution of Seats Act 1885 coupled with the Reform Act 1884. In 1919 the local MP, Josiah Wedgwood, shifted his allegiance from the Liberal Party — the Lloyd George Coalition Liberals allying with the Conservatives — to the Labour Party and the seat elected the Labour candidate who has stood at each election for the next hundred years, a total of 29 elections in succession. Labour came close to losing the seat in 1969, 1986, 2015 and 2017, and eventually lost the seat in 2019. Its 2017 general election result was the fifth-closest result, a winning margin of 30 votes. In 2019, it was subsequently won by the Conservatives for the first time since its creation, by over 7,000 votes. Newcastle-under-Lyme is one of twelve Staffordshire seats won (held or gained) by a Conservative candidate in 2019 out of a total of twelve covering the county.

Audley Rural is a parish of Staffordshire, England, located four miles to the north-west of the town of Newcastle-under-Lyme. It is predominantly a rural area, of which Audley is the centre. Other settlements are Alsagers Bank, Bignall End, Halmer End, Miles Green, Scot Hay and Wood Lane, and the outlying hamlets of Dunkirk, Mill End, Shraley Brook, Eardley End, Coopers Green, Butters Green and Crackley Gates. The population of this parish at the 2011 census was 8,437.The parish elects councillors to Newcastle Borough Council for the Audley and Bignall End ward, and, with Betley and Balterley parishes, for the Halmerend ward. The parish was created in 1932 by a split of the previous Audley parish, much of which went to form the Talke parish.Nearby landmark Bignall Hill provides views south to Cannock Chase and the city of Stoke-on-Trent; north across the Cheshire Plains to Jodrell Bank radio telescope; east to Mow Cop Castle and the Peak District; and west to the mountains of North Wales and Snowdonia.

Keele is a village and civil parish in the Borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire, England. It is approximately 3 miles (4.8 km) west of Newcastle-under-Lyme, and is close to the village of Silverdale. Keele lies on the A53 road from Newcastle to Market Drayton and Shrewsbury. The village is the location of Keele University and Keele Services, a motorway service area on the M6. Keele is located in the Keele ward of the borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme with its name drawing from the old Anglo-Saxon Cȳ-hyll = "Cow-hill". The 2001 census indicated the parish had a population of 3,664,(increasing to 4,129 at the 2011 census) most of whom students at Keele University as one of the halls of residence, Hawthorns, now sold for land redevelopment, was located in the heart of the village.