Darlington is a market and industrial town in County Durham, England. It is the main administrative centre of the unitary authority Borough of Darlington. The borough is a constituent member of the devolved Tees Valley area.

The River Skerne, a tributary of the River Tees, flows through the town. It is sited near to the Yorkshire Dales National Park, being 11 miles (18 km) from the park boundary near the town of Richmond. Darlington had a population of 107,800 in the 2021 Census, which classes it as a "large town".

In the 19th century, establishment of the Stockton and Darlington Railway (the world's first permanent steam locomotive-powered passenger railway) led to the town having an industrial and manufacturing economy.

Darlington started as an Anglo-Saxon settlement. The name derives from the Anglo-Saxon Dearthington, which seemingly meant 'the settlement of Deornoth's people' but, by Norman times, the name had changed to Derlinton. During the 17th and 18th centuries, the town was usually known by the name of Darnton.

Darlington has a historic market area in the town centre. St Cuthbert's Church, built in 1183, is one of the most important early English churches in the north of England and is Grade I listed. The oldest church in Darlington is St Andrew's Church, built around 1100 in Haughton-le-Skerne.

When the author Daniel Defoe visited the town during the 18th century, he noted that it was eminent for "good bleaching of linen, so that I have known cloth brought from Scotland to be bleached here". However, he also disparaged the town, writing that it had "nothing remarkable but dirt"; roads would have typically been unpaved in the 18th century.

The so-called Durham Ox came from Darlington; born in the early 19th century, this steer became renowned for its excellent proportions which came to inform the standard for Shorthorn cattle.

During the early 19th century, Darlington remained a small market town.

The Stockton and Darlington Railway ran steam locomotives designed for passengers and goods, built to a standard gauge, on a permanent main line with branches. On 27 September 1825, George Stephenson's engine, Locomotion No. 1, travelled between Shildon and Stockton-on-Tees via Darlington, an event that was seen as ushering in the modern railway age.

Later in the 19th century, the town became an important centre for railway manufacturing. An early railway works was the Hopetown Carriage Works (est. 1853), which supplied carriages and locomotives to the Stockton and Darlington Railway. The engineering firm of William and Alfred Kitching also manufactured locomotives there around this time. The town eventually developed three significant railway works:

• The largest of these was the main line Darlington Works; its main factory, the North Road Shops, opened in 1863 and remained in operation until 1966.
• Robert Stephenson & Co. (colloquially: "Stivvies"), moved to Darlington from Newcastle upon Tyne in 1902. It was renamed Robert Stephensons & Hawthorns in 1937, was absorbed by English Electric around 1960 and had closed by 1964.
• Faverdale Wagon Works was established in 1923 and closed in 1962; in the 1950s, it was a UK pioneer in applying mass-production techniques to the manufacture of railway goods wagons.

During the 19th century, Darlington Quaker families such as those of Pease and Backhouse emerged as major employers and philanthropists. Industrialist Joseph Pease gave Darlington its landmark clock tower in 1864. The clock face was crafted by T. Cooke & Sons of York, and bells cast by John Warner & Sons of nearby Norton-on-Tees. The bells are sisters to Big Ben.

Darlington Mechanics Institute was opened in 1854 by Elizabeth Pease Nichol, who had donated towards its cost. In 1853, South Park was laid out, over 91 acres (37 ha), with financial support from the Backhouse family.

Architect Alfred Waterhouse, famous for work including London's Natural History Museum and Manchester Town Hall, designed Darlington's Grade II listed Old Town Hall and Market Hall, Darlington in 1860. Four years later he contributed Backhouse's Bank building that is, as of 2022, a branch of Barclays bank.

During the period, George Gordon Hoskins was responsible for much of the town's architecture, designing buildings such as The King's Head Hotel.

Darlington Free Library, a Grade II listed building in Crown Street, was built for £10,000 by Edward Pease. His daughter, Lady Lymington, opened the building on 23 October 1885 and presented it to the town council who agreed to operate it in perpetuity. As of 2022, it contains a library and "centre for local studies".

In 1870, The Northern Echo newspaper launched. Its most famous editor, William Thomas Stead, died on the Titanic. Facing the present Northern Echo building on Priestgate is the William Stead public house named for him.

In 1939, Darlington had the most cinema seats per capita in the United Kingdom.

On the night of 13 January 1945, a Lancaster bomber piloted by Pilot Officer William Stuart McMullen of Canada was on a training exercise when one of its engines caught fire and it crashed on farmland near Lingfield Lane. McMullen heroically stayed at the controls while his crew parachuted to safety and directed the stricken aircraft away from the houses below. He was killed on impact. His heroism was honoured by renaming Lingfield Lane "McMullen Road" and erecting a memorial monument.

Starting in 1993, rail enthusiast group A1 Steam Locomotive Trust worked on building an all-new steam locomotive, the first to be constructed since the 1960s. It was intended to be the 50th member of the long withdrawn LNER Peppercorn Class A1 engine, called Tornado and numbered 60163, from scratch in the 1853 former Stockton and Darlington Railway Carriage Works at Hopetown. Many of the original fleet had been built at Darlington locomotive works in the late 1940s. Tornado was completed in January 2008.

To commemorate the town's contribution to the railways, David Mach's 1997 work Train is located alongside the A66, close to the original Stockton–Darlington railway. It is a life-size brick sculpture of a steaming locomotive emerging from a tunnel, made from 185,000 Accrington Nori bricks. The work had a budget of £760,000.

In 2001, Darlington became the first place in England to allow same-sex civil ceremonies and as of 2022, it hosts an annual Gay Pride Festival at venues across the town. A 2005 Darlington Borough Council project to pedestrianise areas of the town centre, this included some Victorian features along High Row. In August 2008, a fire, in which nobody was killed, caused damage and weeks of closure until the damage fixed for several shops (including Woolworths). The King's Head Hotel was also affected with damage to the roof and 100 bedrooms, the hotel was able to reopen in 2012.

There is one main tier of local government covering Darlington, at unitary authority level, being Darlington Borough Council. The council is a member of the Tees Valley Combined Authority, led by the directly elected Mayor of Tees Valley. Most of the built-up area of Darlington is an unparished area, although some outer parts of the urban area now extend into neighbouring parishes. The council is based at Darlington Town Hall on Feethams in the centre of Darlington.

Darlington was an ancient parish. It was historically divided into four townships: Archdeacon Newton, Blackwell, Cockerton, and a Darlington township covering the town itself and adjoining areas. Such townships also became civil parishes in 1866. A body of improvement commissioners was established in 1823 to provide infrastructure to the more built-up parts of the Darlington township. The commissioners were superseded in 1850 when the whole Darlington township was made a local board district, governed by an elected local board.

The local board was in turn replaced when Darlington was incorporated as a municipal borough in 1867. The borough boundaries were enlarged on several occasions, notably absorbing the Harrowgate Hill area from the parish of Haughton-le-Skerne in 1872, Cockerton in 1915, Haughton-le-Skerne in 1930 and Blackwell in 1967. In 1915 the borough was elevated to become a county borough, taking over county-level functions from Durham County Council.

The borough was substantially enlarged in 1974 to take in most of the surrounding Darlington Rural District, such that the modern borough of Darlington covers both the town and a surrounding rural hinterland. The enlarged borough was also reconstituted as a non-metropolitan district as part of the 1974 reforms, with Durham County Council once more providing county-level services to the town. The borough was made a unitary authority on 1 April 1997, regaining its independence from the county council. The borough remains part of County Durham for ceremonial purposes.

Since 2016, the council has been a member of the Tees Valley Combined Authority along with Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland and Stockton-on-Tees. Unlike Darlington, the other four districts in the combined authority had all been part of the short-lived county of Cleveland between 1974 and 1996.

As of 2024, the Member of Parliament (MP) for the Darlington constituency is Labour's Lola McEvoy. Former members of parliament for the town include Peter Gibson, Jenny Chapman, Alan Milburn (the former Secretary of State for Health under Tony Blair's Labour government) and Michael Fallon (who was Secretary of State for Defence under David Cameron's coalition government and Theresa May's Conservative government).

Darlington is located in the south of County Durham close to the River Tees, which acts as the border between Durham and Yorkshire. Both the River Tees and River Skerne pass through the borough, the Skerne later joining the Tees which then flows east and into the North Sea. Due to river bifurcation at the Baydale Beck and Cocker Beck, which later flow into the Tees and Skerne respectively, much of the western side of Darlington forms a river island.

In the north are Harrowgate, Coatham Mundeville and Beaumont Hill and to the north-east are Whinfield and Haughton Le Skerne. To the east is the suburb of Eastbourne and Red Hall with Firthmoor and Skerne Park to the south. Situated in the west end are Hummersknott, Mowden and Blackwell. Finally, to the north-west are Branksome, Cockerton, Faverdale, The Denes, West Park, High Grange and Pierremont which is associated with the notable Henry Pease (MP).

Place	Distance	Direction	Relation
Hartlepool	18 miles (29 km)	North East	Combined Authority area
Durham	17 miles (27 km)	North	Historic county town and closest city
Middlesbrough	13 miles (21 km)	East	Combined Authority area
Stockton-on-Tees	10 miles (16 km)	East	Combined Authority area

The trend of regional gross value added of Darlington at current basic prices published (pp. 240–253) by the Office for National Statistics, with figures in £ millions.

Year	Regional Gross Value Added	Agricu­lture	Indust­ry	Servi­ces
1995	1,115	8	377	729
2000	1,192	6	417	768
2003	1,538	6	561	971

Finance and manufacturing are now the main elements of its economy.

A major employer in the area is the English division of the Student Loans Company, Student Finance England, which is based at Lingfield Point and employs over 1,000 people. Other large service sector companies with offices in the town include Darlington Building Society. Darlington Borough Council announced that the site for the DL1 complex, previously a car park for Darlington Town Hall, was also to be redeveloped to house riverside office space for the Department for Education to replace its previous office on the edge of the town in Mowden, in an effort to safeguard Darlington jobs. This was officially opened on 19 March 2015. The Disclosure and Barring Service has a national office in the town. Amazon UK operates a warehouse facility, which opened in early 2020, employing 1,300 full-time staff, one of the town's biggest employers.

EE is the largest private sector employer in the town, with 2,500 staff. The company took over its operations from one of its predecessors, Orange Mobile.

The Morton Park area of Darlington is currently undergoing a partial redevelopment, with areas of unused waste land being redeveloped into modern industrial and office space. Other commercial spaces in Darlington include North Road Industrial Estate, Cleveland Trading Estate and Faverdale Industrial Estate. The council depot on Central Park is also to be redeveloped into commercial space.

Darlington has a rich engineering heritage and several notable engineering firms established locally. Bridge building was particularly important in the town. Bridges built in Darlington span the River Nile and Amazon.

Local engineering firms include:

• Cummins has an engine building facility near Morton Park.
• AMEC's industrial arm is headquartered in the town
• Darlington Forge Company originated in the town, c. 1967
• Whessoe originated in Darlington.

As an historic market town, a weekly outdoor market was held on the market square, which is one of the biggest in the country. An indoor market is located underneath the town clock on Prebend Row.

Retailers in the area include:

• Prebend Row hosts the Cornmill Shopping centre
• Grange Road and Skinnergate has a number of independent shops
• Duke Street houses art galleries and restaurants
• Argos, a UK retail company, has its largest warehouse distribution centre in the North of England located in Darlington; it is sited within the Faverdale Industrial Estate, in the north-west of the town.

In November 2012, a deal was signed between Darlington Borough Council and developer Terrace Hill for a £30 million re-development of the site of the former Feethams bus depot. The proposal had an expected completion date of late 2014, though this did overrun with completion early 2016.

Darlington Memorial Hospital is on Hollyhurst Road, in the corridor between Woodland Road and The Denes. The private Woodlands Hospital is at Morton Park.

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