Lambton Collieries

Lambton Collieries was a privately owned colliery and coal mining company, based in County Durham, England.

The name derives from Lambton Castle, the ancestral family home of the Lambton family.

With coal having been extracted in the area from the 1600s, the commercial extraction of coal was developed by John Lambton in the lands surrounding the castle through the Wear Valley. The first of seven pits was sunk in the village of Bournmoor from 1783 onwards, which together were to make up what was known as Lambton Colliery.

The company was first formed when Lambton's grandson, John Lambton the first Earl of Durham, entered Parliament as a Whig politician. The formal name change to Lambton Collieries was adopted in 1896.

In 1910 the company merged with Hetton Collieries to form Lambton & Hetton Collieries. In 1924, that company merged with Joicey Collieries to form Lambton, Hetton & Joicey Collieries.

In 1947, along with all of the other private coal companies of the United Kingdom, it was nationalised under the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act 1946 to form the National Coal Board.

To enable the coal extracted from the collieries to be transported to the River Wear, from 1737 the company had constructed a horse-drawn tramway from Fatfield to Cox Green. In 1819 the Lambton's bought the Newbottle wagonway, and connected this to the Lambton Railway with a line between Bournmoor and Philadelphia. This now meant that the company had a direct route from its collieries to the River Wear, where it constructed Lambton Staithes within the Port of Sunderland.

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