TRUDGING from the mineshaft, black with coal-dust from their plastic helmets to their steel-capped boots and naked legs, the Hatfield miners appear as a vision from a former age. The three-metre thick Barnsley seam they have spent the past eight hours clawing at is, in fact, merely half a mile underground. Yet the geo-economy which, over the course of three centuries, it has brought into being, sustained and sometimes blighted, in pit villages across South Yorkshire and machines, factories and power-stations across Britain, is almost dead now.
At their peak, shortly before the first world war, the deep mines of Yorkshire, Durham, South Wales and other sedimentary places, engines of the Industrial Revolution, employed over a million men and boys. They were the foundation of the modern British economy, “a sort of caryatid”, wrote George Orwell, “upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported”. But mining has ever since been in decline, marked by sudden bursts of pit closure more divisive, and calamitous for the communities affected, than any other aspect of Britain’s deindustrialisation. Twenty-three pits closed in 1985,...Continue reading
via Brian Rushton, The end of industry
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