32 C O N T E X T 1 0 9 : M A Y 2 0 0 9 in a railway cutting, accessed by one of the shafts, and opened in 1987. But visitor numbers declined from a peak of 70,000 to 40,000 a year, council support ebbed away, and in 1993 the museum closed and its trust went into liquidation. In 1994 the museum collection was largely sold and dispersed (sending shivers down the spines of the museum world), and ownership of the site reverted to Stoke-on-Trent City Council. Since then, two feasibility studies have failed to establish a viable future for the site.The joke now is that the first pit to produce a million tons of coal is becoming the first to produce a million sheets of paper. The site now comprises 34 buildings and structures in about 18 acres, surrounded by a partially reclaimed landscape of tips and stacking grounds. The many miles of underground workings are entirely flooded. The buildings include four shafts with headstocks and winders (one large steam winder, two electric winders, and an early haulage engine introduced by the museum). The heapstead (the buildings and works around the mineshaft) and mine car circuit of the Hesketh shaft survive intact – a roller coaster for coal. An impressive main power house contains appropriate compressors (steam and electric) reinstated by the museum. The complete ventilation fan installation survives. The boiler house is roofless and ruinous, but still retains its unrivalled range of 10 Lancashire boilers and associated plant, together with its brick chimney, slightly shortened by the late Fred Dibnah to 200 feet (60m). Large fitting shops and stores reflect the scale of mechanisation, while the pithead baths and canteens attest to the 20th century political concern for miners’ welfare. The only significant loss from this complex is the screens building, apparently demolished by the museum to make way for the mock mine, which has itself recently been demolished following a collapse. The structures are now in poor condition (except for the newly regenerated former offices and weighbridge house), having had virtually no maintenance from the closure of the museum, apart from urgent holding repairs as a part of the first phase of the current project. This is still a dauntingly powerful and evocative place, carrying the imprint of all that human energy, of lives and deaths. The peeling walls of the baths can still echo in the mind with the singing of the miners in the serried rows of showers, the clatter of those thousands of locker doors – a clean locker and a dirty locker for every man. We can imagine the ceaseless cacophony of the machinery, the Hesketh Winder spinning those great wheels to lift a cage of loaded mine cars every two minutes to rattle off round the circuit to the screens and waiting wagons. It is much harder to imagine those miles of flooded tunnels deep below, each roadway (‘cruts’ they called them here) as familiar to the miners as the streets above. Then there is another more distant echo. Like all pits, for some in the surrounding community Chatterley Whitfield is an industrial war grave. The surrounding landscape gives a clue to the huge scale of the underground workings. The waste tips that filled the valley and rose to twin summits were once the largest in Europe. The visual drama of the tips was reduced by a smoothing off in the 1980s, but their size can still impress. The surrounding early-20th-century cottage estates that grew with the pit in its peak years are still almost intact, and include the nucleus of a model village started by the company. However, the earlier terrace housing – a fascinating and rare grid of dual access streets and paths at Fegg Hayes – is seriously threatened by demolition. When the museum closed, the council’s first ambition was to clear the site. Eventually, after five years of diplomacy and reflection, the time was ripe for an initiative. In 1999 the ChatterleyWhitfield Partnership was formed by English Heritage, Stoke-on-Trent City Council, JoanWalley MP and AdvantageWest Midlands (the regional development agency). Its purpose is to promote the regeneration of the site in order to secure its long-term future, regenerate the local economy, and improve amenities for local people. Funding of £2.3 million was obtained for the first phase. This comprised emergency works, information gathering, master planning and top-priority repairs. The scale of the challenge is indicated by the figures for studies alone: £300,000 for the condition survey, £200,000 for a basic metric survey, £36,000 for a conservation plan and £75,000 for the master plan. Meanwhile, English Partnerships accepted the site into its National Coalfields Programme, a centrally funded reclamation and regeneration scheme. The final recommendations were submitted to the ODPM in 2005, and grant funding of £8 million approved later that year. However, most of this will be spent on further land reclamation, to deal with a failing culvert beneath the main tip. Unlike the 1980s reclamation, the opportunity will now be taken to emphasise the industrial history of the landscape, rather than erasing it. Miners’ lockers at ChatterleyWhitfield colliery (Photo: Boris Baggs, ©English Heritage)
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