The name Ashington comes from the older form Essendene, traced back to records from around 1170. Most likely it began as Aesc-dene - the wooded valley of an Anglo-Saxon called Aesc, or perhaps simply ash dene, the dene lined with ash trees. The Wansbeck dene runs through here still, sheltered and green where it cuts the town's western flank. Through the 1700s, all that existed of Ashington was a small farm with a few dwellings around it. The transformation began in the 1840s, when the Duke of Portland built terraced housing to draw workers escaping the Great Famine of Ireland to his nearby collieries. The miners came, and they brought their families, and Ashington grew at a pace its founders could not have imagined. By the heyday of coal, this place was called the world's largest coal-mining village. There is still a debate, sometimes friendly, sometimes not, about whether Ashington should be called a town or a village now. Either way, it ranks among the largest of its kind in England.

As the collieries expanded, the Ashington Coal Company built parallel rows of houses to hold the workforce. The Hirst End was laid out on a grid: streets running north to south were named for British trees - Hawthorn Road, Beech Terrace, Chestnut Street. The east-west streets were numbered avenues, First Avenue near the town centre running south to Seventh Avenue at the southern edge. Newcomers arrived from as far as Cornwall, bringing tin-mining skills they could adapt to coal. The Blyth and Tyne Railway opened Ashington's railway station in 1878, linking the town to Newbiggin and Tynemouth. By 1896 the population justified the creation of Ashington Urban District. After the 1920s, council housing replaced the colliery rows, and the semi-detached Garden City Villas rose across the Hirst fields. The biggest expansion came in the late 1960s, with the new estates pushing south past Seventh Avenue. The Pitmatic dialect, distinct from Geordie though sharing some of its rhythms, runs through all of this - the speech of pitmen and their families, surviving the closure of the deep pits that gave it birth.

What began as an evening pastime in 1934 became something none of the participants had anticipated. The Ashington Group, as they called themselves, painted what they knew - pit cages descending, colliery rows, family life, miners washing in tin baths in front of kitchen fires. Critics called it workers' art and rediscovered it in the 1970s; by 2006, a £16 million museum housing their work was opened in Ashington by the Princess Royal. The art historian William Feaver's book on the group inspired Lee Hall - the playwright behind Billy Elliot - to write a stage play that premiered at Live Theatre Newcastle in 2007 and went on to the Royal National Theatre. A German translation premiered in Vienna in 2009. Oscar-winning director Jon Blair made a documentary in 2011, featuring Robson Green and rare film of the original group in their hut. The town that produced these painters also produced a remarkable roll-call of footballers. Jack and Bobby Charlton, both England internationals and World Cup winners in 1966, were born and raised here. So were Jackie Milburn, Jimmy Adamson, and more recently the Premier League referee Michael Oliver, the youngest in the league's history, and Steve and Ben Harmison of England cricketing fame. Cricketer Mark Wood is also an Ashington man.

Until 1988, most men in Ashington worked underground. The closure of the deep pits hit hard. Ellington Colliery, the last of the big mines in the area, hung on until January 2005, when it too closed. The Wansbeck Business Park rose where Ashington Colliery once stood, home now to companies including Polar Krush, Thermacore, and Sugarfayre. The Woodhorn pit became a museum, with a permanent Pitmen Painters exhibition alongside the mining history. Queen Elizabeth II Country Park, just north of town, surrounds a lake with pine woodland and a narrow-gauge railway running to the museum. Riverside Park follows the Wansbeck through the green of the dene, with footpaths leading west to Bothal and its castle perched above the river. The Northumberland Line reopened to passengers in December 2024, after sixty years - the rail link from Ashington to Newcastle restored. The town now serves as a commuter base for Newcastle, fifteen miles south, while still cherishing what it was and what it produced. Pitmen who painted what they saw. Boys who kicked footballs in the colliery streets and went on to lift the World Cup.