Bank Road
road in Matlock, Derbyshire, England, UK
Bank Road is a road in Matlock, Derbyshire which runs from Crown Square up Matlock Bank, a steep hill which gives the road its name, to Wellington Street. Although many consider the whole incline to be Bank Road, beyond Smedley Street, just over halfway up, the road is called Rutland Street.
Tram
In 1893 a cable tramway was built along Bank Road. Halfway up there was a stop at Smedley Street where Smedley's Hydro (built by John Smedley) was situated. Conceived by Job Smith, the tram was inspired by San Francisco's famous cable cars, and cost £20,000. When it was built it was the steepest tramway in the world at a gradient of 1 in 5½, and it rose 300 feet. The fare was tuppence up, penny down. It closed in 1927 after losing business to cars and buses.
Landmarks
Bank Road has many local landmark buildings along it – from the bottom of the hill (Crown Square) travelling north:
The Crown Hotel – the original site of the hotel which gave its name to Crown Square is now a building society office. The Crown is now a Wetherspoon's pub just along Bakewell Road.
The public source identifies “Bank Road” as road in Matlock, Derbyshire, England, UK. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bank, Road and road.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4855965. The first chronological checks are 1893 and 1927.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bank Road” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.