Coke being pushed from an oven into the coke car at Monckton coke works at Royston. The Monckton Coke & Chemical Company was owned by Hargreaves Services plc and had been producing metallurgical coke for more than 130 years at its site near Barnsley, South Yorkshire. At the time Monckton was the only independent coke works in the UK, producing more than 200,000 tonnes per year of the highest-quality coke for markets worldwide. The works closed at the end of 2014.