• Long Eaton - 'Island farm/settlement'. 'Long' to distingish from Little.

Long Eaton is at the lower end of the rich mineral valley of the Erewash, a quiet old-fashioned village almost within living memory, it has outstripped its neighbours and become an active town, busy with many industries from dainty lace to heavy railway waggons.

Once it belonged to Sawley; today it has made Sawley part of itself. Churches, chapels, and fine schools have come into being in this place which has set its playing fields in gardens and its library in lawns.

On the Derby road is Trent College, a public school founded in 1866, while a mile or so away the Trent flows on through peaceful meadows.

At the heart of the town, just off the marketplace,is a link with the past in a church the Normans and the Saxons knew. In the early days a chapel of Sawley, it was refashioned 600 years ago, when the tower and its spire was built. Now the old nave and chancel have become the aisle and chapel of a larger building designed by G.E.Street in 1868.

One of Long Eatons playgrounds is Trent Lock, where three counties meet. Here the Soar comes into the Trent, which has only lately gathered the Derwent to itself below Wilne, and the waters leap the weir under Red Hill, a headland looking into Derbyshire and Leicestershire from Nottinghamshire. Here is a wonderful scene in summer with its pleasure boats, and the white wings of the yachts racing by.

Until the expansion of Long Eaton, the district hereabouts was mainly agricultural and although there was stocking-making in the village before 1680, it never became extensive occupation. Many people from Sawley (close-by) worked in the mills at Wilne which were spinning cotton by water power towards the end of the 18th century and people from both Long Eaton and Sawley worked on the waterways.

Long Eaton became the centre of two transport systems. The first was when the canals were built and the Trent navigation was improved to make Trent Lock, a ‘crossroads’ on the waterways. The Erewash canal, the Trent navigation and the Soar navigation to Leicester and London all converged at Trent Lock where the warehouses, boat-building yards and public houses served this busy hub, especially during the first half of the 19th century.