Crook only really appeared on maps around 1795, although the smaller villages surrounding it, Billy Row, Stanley, White Lea, and Helmington Row, had been settled for centuries. In its early years the new village had an inn, a blacksmith, and not much else. Farming dominated. Then in the 1830s the geology revealed its secret. Coal lay close to the surface around Crook, easy to extract, and within forty years a sleepy agricultural settlement had become a mining village. The pit work transformed the town's population and economy. Rows of terraced houses went up to accommodate the miners. Hope Street and the surrounding lanes filled with workers who had come from across northern England chasing wages underground.

Jack Greenwell was born in Crook in 1884. He started as a footballer for Crook Town and later played in Spain, but his real legacy was as a coach. In 1917 he became the first official head coach of FC Barcelona. Over two spells with the Catalan club he won four Catalan championships and two Copa del Rey titles. He later coached Peru's national team to victory at the 1939 South American Championship and served as tactical advisor to the Peru side at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The miner's son from a County Durham pit village became one of the most successful coaches in the early history of FC Barcelona, a fact that almost nobody in Spain or in Crook itself fully appreciates. He died in Bogota, Colombia, in 1942, far from both his adopted Barcelona and the Weardale town that produced him.

Crook punches well above its weight for famous residents. Brian Foster, the particle physicist and Donald H Perkins Professor of Experimental Physics at Oxford, grew up here. Bill Rowe, who twice won the BAFTA for Best Sound and worked on more than 160 films between 1955 and 1992, was a Crook native. Doug McCarthy reached four consecutive BDO World Darts Championships between 1979 and 1982. Constantine Scollen left Crook as a young man to become a missionary priest among the Blackfoot and Cree peoples of Canada in the late 19th century, learning their languages and writing some of the earliest dictionaries of their tongues. Darren Holloway played in the Premier League for Sunderland AFC. Nigel Wright held the English light welterweight boxing title three times. Not bad for a town with one main street.

Crook sits in a bowl, with hills rising on every side except the south. The tallest stands at 300 metres above the town, roughly 980 feet. The highest point in the town itself is on West Road at 210 metres. The market still runs on Tuesday mornings, with a few stalls also setting up on Saturdays, in a designated conservation area of the town centre. St Catherine's Church of England parish church sits centrally on Church Hill, with Our Lady Immaculate and St Cuthbert's Roman Catholic Church beside it. St Andrew's Church is Grade II listed and operates as a Local Ecumenical Project between the United Reformed Church and the Methodists. On the hill to the east, Crook Golf Club enjoys some of the best views in Weardale.

The nickname is well earned. The A689 from Durham runs straight through Crook and continues west into Wolsingham and Stanhope, climbing into the upper reaches of Weardale and eventually crossing the Pennines. Travellers heading for the dales pass through here. Two miles west of town, back on the A689, stands the surviving Harperley POW Camp 93, a Second World War prisoner-of-war camp now open to visitors. Crook itself hosts a carnival each July, complete with parade, rides, stalls, and live music, plus a Winter Light Parade in late November that switches on the Christmas lights. Crookfest, held on the Sunday of the May Bank Holiday weekend, runs three stages of live music at Crook AFC's football ground. For a town of fewer than ten thousand people, it punches above its weight on culture too.