In February 1859, miners working for the Duke of Newcastle struck coal at Shireoaks, a few miles north. The Duke owned mineral rights across much of north Nottinghamshire and north-east Derbyshire, and a company was set up to exploit them: the Shireoaks Colliery Company, formally registered in December 1864. Within a few years it was buying up adjacent prospects at Whitwell, Clowne and Steetley. Sinking began at Steetley in May 1873, and the miners reached the coal in December 1875. That moment was a turning point for the nearby town of Worksop, which had until then been mainly agricultural. Worksop tipped over the next few decades into an industrial centre, its population growing as the pits opened and the railways arrived to take the coal away.

A coal mine needs at least two shafts to ventilate properly: one to bring fresh air down, the other to carry stale air out. Steetley had only one. For nearly two decades this made the mine difficult and dangerous to work. The Shireoaks Colliery Company solved the problem by sinking a second shaft at the new Whitwell Colliery on Belph Moor in May 1890, intending the two mines to share a ventilation system. Twenty-two men in two teams reached the Top Hard seam 933 feet below Belph Moor on 23 October 1891, then drilled further to the High Hazel seam another 390 feet down. From the lower level they drove a heading sideways toward Steetley. In 1894 the two mines were linked underground, fresh air pulling down through Steetley and back up through Whitwell. A second Whitwell shaft followed in 1898, allowing the ventilation flow to be tuned more carefully, and Steetley was also connected to Shireoaks. Three pits sharing one breathing system: a small engineering triumph hidden beneath the Derbyshire fields.

By 1950 Steetley was running one of the most productive coal faces in the region. More than 500 people worked there, around 40 per cent of the total industrial workforce in Worksop. Because the pit was remote from the existing housing, the Shireoaks Company built a new pit village to accommodate the miners, naming it after G. Preston Rhodes, the chairman of the Shireoaks Colliery Company — a naming that shares its form with Cecil Rhodes' southern African colony but was entirely local in origin. The coincidence is now part of the unusual texture of the area: a Nottinghamshire village called Rhodesia, still on the maps after the African country has been gone for over forty years. The Top Hard seam under Steetley was famous in mining circles, valued for its quality across British industry and exported widely. A second seam, the High Hazel, was worked from 1956 to 1983 and supplied domestic fuel.

In 1945 the Shireoaks Colliery Company was sold to United Steel Companies, and the following year the whole British coal industry was nationalised. Steetley came under the National Coal Board, in its North East Division Number One Area, then transferred to the South Yorkshire Area in 1967. In March 1983, Steetley and Shireoaks were amalgamated; the surface works at Steetley closed, and coal from the Steetley workings was wound up through the Shireoaks shafts instead. Shireoaks itself reorganised in 1990 and closed within months. The Steetley quarry, which had given the chapel its stone in the twelfth century and supplied magnesian limestone and dolomite into modern industry, had closed in the 1960s. The colliery site is now being redeveloped by Laing O'Rourke as Explore Industrial Park. A Norman chapel, a Victorian pit, a colonial-named village, and a twenty-first-century logistics complex: four layers of land use within a single mile.