Talk:Norton, County Durham

Lack of citations

Imagine you live in Nebraska. Mighty pretty. You look up some places in Yoo-rope. Norton - seems a good choice.

• "A well known effigy ..." - a what, where? What is it? Where is it? What does it look like and does it eat corn? A reference would make it clearer.
• "Big Ben is on a platform at a local railway station ..." What would convince me? A reference, for example, a newspaper report might do the same. "The diameter is 9 feet 5½ inches; the height outside 7 feet 10½ inches; inside 6 feet 8 inches." Does such a bell exist at Darlington Station? The reference states very clearly that it was broken up in London and recast. That means they used the broken one to make the present one.
• "The first railway in the world passed through Norton ..." Could it be true that all the maps are wrong? ... that the shortest route to Darlington fom Stockton (which should be due west) was actually served by a railway that went north first?
• "... first railway in the world" There were railways before steam. They were horse-drawn. Amazing but true. Stockton and Darlington's railway was initially for freight - but was augmented with a passenger service. It is this that it claims as a world first. However, this railway didn't call at Norton until years later.
• "Quad suburb" Hey fella - you just keep on speakin' that English of yours. Francis Hannaway 19:27, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

A note to Sn1sn1sn1 and friends

• The Rocket was never used on the Stockton and Darlington Railway, but Locomotion No 1 was.

• Norton was never on the Stockton and Darlington Railway. It passed to the south of Stockton - nowhere near Norton; you are refering to a later railway.
• The brick sculpture of a train near Darlington depicts the Mallard, not the Rocket.

... it didn't take me long to look up this information - perhaps you could do the same before you rewrite sections.

Best wishes - Francis Hannaway (talk) Francis Hannaway 16:05, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

Image gallery

The photo described as the Methodist Church is not the methodist Church, it is Christ Church Mission. The Methodist Church is closer to the High Street, opposite Plant's butchers. 82.3.200.9 (talk) 06:36, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

Town status

I have readded the removed town part as stated here: https://stockton.gov.uk/our-six-towns

It is classed as one of the six towns, not an area of Stockton but a town as well. So the removal of town was unjustified and uncalled for as well as misleading. So I've readded it. Any issues with this, please discuss here. Thanks DragonofBatley (talk) 04:59, 23 July 2022 (UTC)

I don't think "town" is the right way to describe Norton. It fails all the normal ways we define towns:

• It is not a civil parish whose parish council has declared it to be a town under Section 245 of the Local Government Act 1972. The main built-up part of the old parish of Norton was absorbed into the borough of Stockton in 1913. (A residual parish of Norton did continue to exist until 1968 but it only covered the more rural western part of the old parish.)
• It is not a post town - it has a Stockton-on-Tees postal address, and as far as I can tell isn't even a postally required locality.
• It is not classed as a separate built-up area by the Office for National Statistics, but as part of the Stockton built-up area.
• It is no longer a market town - yes, it was granted a market charter c. 1109, but the market lapsed so long ago that it can hardly be the defining way of describing modern Norton. (I've not been able to find out exactly when the Norton market ceased operating, but as Stockton had a market from 1310 I'd be surprised if there were two markets operating so close together after that - market charters often had rules about how close together markets were allowed to be.)

In the absence of it passing one of those definitions, I think we'd need to see compelling evidence that general usage calls it a town before making that our primary description of the place in the article. I am unconvinced that the Stockton Council "six towns" reference alone provides that evidence - it seems to be a marketing initiative aimed at encouraging investment in the borough's main shopping centres, which feels like a weak basis for determining the best way of describing the place.

I am also concerned that when somewhere is described as a town, you can then use its built-up area / parish to provide statistics and determine where its notable suburbs are - we can't do that for Norton. Someone has derived a population figure for it by summing the populations of the wards in 2011 which had Norton in their name, but that feels like WP:SYNTH, and anyway those wards have since been superseded (wards being regularly reviewed to have standard population sizes).

I would suggest that we should describe Norton as a suburb of Stockton, whilst acknowledging its former status as a separate village and (anciently) a market town in the history section. Stortford (talk) 14:01, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Suburbs

Wolviston, Wynyard, Roseworth or Ragworth are not suburbs or wards of Norton. That information is entirely incorrect. I'm from here and live here, and judging by the comments of some editors, I'm guessing you've never been here. Norton isn't even a town despite the Council's new slogan. 90.211.71.233 (talk) 10:40, 24 August 2023 (UTC)