Bishop Auckland is a market town in County Durham, England, located 12 miles northwest of Darlington and southwest of Durham. Known to the Britons and Anglo-Saxons as Alclyt, meaning "rock above the clyde river", Bishop Auckland is located on the River Gaunless. The Norse called the area Aukland, meaning "additional land", and, in 1000, the land was given to the Earl of Northumberland; in 1020, King Canute donated the land to the Bishop of Durham. A manor house was established in the town in 1183, and a great hall was completed in 1195. By 1801, the town had a population of 1,861 people; by 1851, the population had doubled to 5,112 people. By the turn of the 20th century, Bishop Auckland had become a mining town with a population of 16,000 people. However, the town began to decline as its coal reserves were exhausted, and the Great Slump saw the town's unemployment rise to 60% in 1932. By the 1980s, the town suffered from deindustrialization. In 2011, Bishop Auckland had a population of 24,908 people. From 1885 to 1918, the town had a Liberal Party MP in Parliament; it went on to have a Labour MP from 1918 to 2019 (with the exception of a National Liberal break from 1931 to 1935), when the Conservative Party candidate Dehenna Davison won the constituency with 53.7% of the vote.
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