RIDDINGS, a market-town and chapelry in the parish of ALFRETON, hundred of SCARSDALE, county of DERBY, 3 miles (S.) from Alfreton, with which the population is returned. The living is a perpetual curacy, in the archdeaconry of Derby, and diocese of Lichfield and Coventry, and in the patronage of W.P. Morewood, Esq. The chapel having long been demolished, a new one is now being erected in the early English style, for the completion of which, £1000 has been subscribed, and the remaining expense is to be defrayed by the commissioners, appointed under the late act, for promoting the building of additional churches and chapels.

There are places of worship for Baptists, Independents, and Wesleyan Methodists. The new line of road from Manchester to Nottingham, and a branch of the Cromford canal, connected with Mansfield by a rail-road, pass through this place, which has recently obtained the grant of a market: there are extensive iron-works, and furnaces for smelting iron-ore, immense quantities of which and of coal are obtained in the immediate neighbourhood, and give employment to a large proportion of the inhabitants, of whom some are also employed in the adjacent mines, forges, &c., of Birch-wood and Codnor Park. These establishments, formed about 1801, have been the cause of greatly increasing the population of Riddings, which, prior to that period, was but small; although in early ages it was a place of considerable consequence.