C O N T E X T 1 0 9 : M A Y 2 0 0 9 15 Miles Oglethorpe Losing our mines The legacy of the deep coal mining industry lives on, deeply embedded not only in the mining communities, but also in the fabric of villages, towns and cities. In 21st-century Britain, the mention of coal tends to elicit relentlessly negative memories, ranging from miners’ strikes, flying pickets and crippling diseases to subsidence, pollution and unemployment. Yet without coal there would have been no energy to fuel the industrial revolution, and no wealth to support the art and architecture that enriched British society throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Today there is very little understanding of the extent to which coal underpins our quality of life, or of the immensity of the industry that has sustained it. Equally there is little awareness of the extent to which our historic environment is comprised of elements produced by or relating to the coal industry. Coal was such an integral part of daily life in the UK that it was taken for granted to the extent that it became invisible. It was responsible for providing almost all our energy, either directly through domestic fires in houses across the country, or indirectly via steam generated in coal-fired boilers powering the machinery of industry, and the locomotives carrying goods and people within the densest railway network in the world. Even town gas was generated from coal by gasworks situated in big cities and small towns, and the bricks from which a significant proportion of buildings were constructed also emanated from the coal industry. Equally, much of the invisible infrastructure beneath our feet, such as drains and sewers, was constructed using clay products manufactured by coal companies. The extent to which coal dominated our lives is demonstrated by the fact that as recently as 50 years ago over 100,000 people were employed in the mining industry in Scotland alone. A decade earlier, the National Coal Board (NCB) had been created with the nationalisation of the industry on 1 January 1947. The scale of its physical legacy is revealed by the extraordinary range of assets taken over by the state. These included 1,500 working collieries, 30 fuel and briquetting plants, 55 coke ovens and chemical by-product plants, 85 brickworks, 1,803 farms, 140,000 houses, 27,000 farm houses and cottages, and 275 shops and business premises. Other items included swimming baths, cinemas, private mineral railways, wharves, depots, retail milk rounds, a holiday camp, a bicycle track, and 177,000 mainline railway wagons and locomotives. These details mask the fact that the coal industry was in a desperate state in 1947. Working conditions were generally poor, and years of inadequate investment both before and during the war had led to poor productivity and morale. At the same time, demand for coal was rising, propelled by the needs of post-war reconstruction. The NCB responded by embarking on a programme of major new sinkings and reconstructions, combined with the closure for those mines that were considered uneconomic and unsafe. The result was the creation of a new generation of confident colliery buildings. In Scotland, many of these were to the design of the Austrian architect Egon Riss, who became the NCB architect north of the border following nationalisation. This was the golden era of the coal industry. No one doubted its supremacy, but its dominance was soon to be challenged by a sequence of setbacks. The first of these was the impact of a sequence of ‘pea-souper’ smogs in the early 1950s in which thousands of people perished, and which resulted in the imposition of clean-air legislation in 1956 and 1968, curtailing the burning of coal in towns and cities. In the meantime, steam locomotives were being replaced by diesel and electric traction on the railways, and competition from LadyVictoria Colliery, Newtongrange, Midlothian, home of the Scottish Mining Museum since the 1980s (Historic Scotland, 2008) Rothes Colliery in Fife, the first Scottish superpit, opened in 1958 and demolished in 1993 (Crown Copyright: RCAHMS, SC446437)
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=