High Shincliffe is in the Durham City parliamentary constituency represented by the Labour Party's Mary Foy.

There used to be a sub Post Office at Bank Top which also served as a small general store - since 2019 it has been Betty Bee's coffee shop.

The nearest railway station is about three miles away in Durham, on the East Coast Main Line between London and Edinburgh.

[2] By the mid-1860s, ownership had passed through a series of partnerships to Joseph Love & Partners, who also owned Houghall Colliery, and from 1867, the two mines were worked together.

In total, 18 people were killed at the mine, the youngest being a girl aged nine years who strayed onto the waggonway and was crushed by some waggons.

By the time of the 1960–1969 Ordnance Survey map there were even fewer houses, and the name Shincliffe Colliery was finally lost.

Subsequently, policy changes by the County Council led to a major housing development and primary school, and the introduction of the name 'High Shincliffe'.

The line of the colliery waggon-way can still be traced northwards past Manor Farm and on to Shincliffe Lane.

High Shincliffe is surrounded by farmland supporting a mixture of crops and livestock, and several brakes largely deciduous woodland.

The hedgerows include trees such as oak, ash and rowan, and bushes such as bramble, briar, elder and blackthorn.

Two sand pits can be found towards Shincliffe Village, and whilst of no economic value now, would have had some significance in times past.

It can be speculated that these pockets of sand resulted from small rivers outflowing from retreating glaciers at the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago.

Visible from High Shincliffe, from the south west around to the east, are escarpments of Permian magnesian limestone (dolomite), which is intensively quarried for roadstone throughout the region.