The civil parish extends west and north to the River Calder, and includes the large village of Altofts.

Work began in 1837 under the supervision of George Stephenson on the construction of the North Midland Railway from Derby to Leeds.

The Leeds and Manchester lines crossed a 51-mile (82 km) stretch across the Pennines and at the time had the world's longest railway station platform at Normanton, a quarter of a mile long.

The town also served as an important part of the transport infrastructure for national and local industries including coal and bricks, although most of this was lost during the 1950s and 1960s with the last remaining operational brickworks eventually closing in the mid-1990s.

A fourth works was founded in the 1890s by a Thomas Kirk from Nottingham, who had heard rumours that Normanton was rapidly turning into an important junction on the railways.

Both Kirk and his sons used their life savings and formed the Normanton Brick Company at nearby Altofts which finally closed in 2011 The coming of the railways enabled the locally mined coal to be sent across the country.

The disputes surrounding the miners' strike of 1984–85 meant that many mines across the country were to close although by this stage there were no collieries still in production in Normanton.

However, the strike still affected many families in the area, as Normanton colliers still worked in pits in neighbouring towns.

The area once occupied by the St John's or Newland Colliery is now part of the controversial Welbeck landfill site which has been the subject of both local and national media attention since its development as a toxic tip.

The site attracted so much negative attention that the group Residents Against Toxic Scheme (RATS) was established to halt planning permission for the disposal of toxic chemicals at the site, claiming the scheme was an extreme health hazard.

Normanton has become a growing commuter suburb of the Leeds City Region, with relatively cheap housing and efficient transport links.

The addition and expansion of the Eurolink Industrial Estate at Junction 31 of the M62 attracted national and multi-national corporations to locate their distribution depots to Normanton.

The Newland estate was a small township on the outskirts of Normanton and lies on the north bank of the River Calder.

The old Normanton brickyard, situated just off of the A655 Wakefield Road, was used in the late-1990s as the fictional setting of a murder in the ITV series A Touch Of Frost.

The structure was intact but abandoned at the time of filming and was the ideal location favoured by the ITV production team.

Within 18 months of filming, the structure had been declared unsafe, and was partially demolished, leaving only the chimney stack standing.