A gathering of children outside the Wharf Chapel in the coal mining village of Pinxton. They may have got together for the annual Sunday School parade. Coal was mined on a small scale in Pinxton since Tudor times. With the arrival of a branch of the Cromford Canal in the 1790's a localised industrial revolution began. Within a decade or so of the canal's arrival several deep coal pits, four lime kilns and a china works were in operation near to the Wharf. The wharf was the terminus for the canal, which was built to link the collieries to the river Trent.