An opinion piece from the Mirror by Paul Routledge suggests that, if we’re ever to understand where we’re going, we have to grasp where we’ve come from…
The Mirror writes:
Drive into the former pit village of South Elmsall and you’ll see a massive steel wheel set in concrete by the roadside. It once turned day and night, taking down miners and bringing up coal that warmed homes and kept industry going. Now it’s all that left of Frickley Colliery, once the pride of the Yorkshire coalfield, employing 2,000 men. The mine was closed and dynamited, like many more in the 1990s in Thatcher’s industrial holocaust. The wheel is a mute reminder of a way of life. A slice of industrial archaeology for people who will never know the reality of the miners and their communities. It’s a moving monument but it’s not enough to tell the story of generations who toiled underground so we could put the lights on. Not enough to pay tribute. If we’re ever to understand where we’re going, we have to grasp where we’ve come from: workers who put the Great into GB.
Industrial archaeology – saving the bricks, mortar and steel – began in the 1960s when historians realised mills, coal mines, ceramic works and even gasometers tell a different story of yesteryear from the country houses of the rich and famous. It’s alright faffing about in Downton Abbey-land, admiring the ancestral portraits of Sir John and Lady Mary and their Chippendale furniture. But where are the places of work that made the toffs their money? Gone under the bulldozer. A big political push to save what’s left was launched today. MPs and peers of all parties joined forces to demand that industrial heritage sites that helped shape the country must be protected.
Labour MP Nick Thomas-Symonds says: ‘We have some beautiful stately homes but equally our heritage is about the history of working people.’…
… Ex-miners fought to preserve the headgear at Thorne Colliery, near Doncaster. This gaunt steel frame dominates the flat landscape, a stark souvenir of an age already slipping into lost consciousness. But it’s edifices like these that act as triggers to the memory of what has gone. And here’s another thing. Nobody complains that Fountains Abbey, Bolton Abbey and the nation’s great castles are ruins, shells of their former glory. They are admired for what they once were and what they contributed to the Middle Ages. So our Victorian and 20th-century industrial heritage doesn’t have to be prettified to make it attractive and meaningful. I’d sooner see a soot-blackened, stabilised ruin of a stone textile mill that evokes the ghosts of workers past than rows of so-called executive homes. Back in South Elmsall, the colliery wheel is sited next to the memorial where the village’s war dead are remembered. That’s how much they value their working past…and it’s a lesson the country should learn.
