This week the last deep coal mine in the UK closed.
It wasn’t for environmental reasons - we’re still importing coal for our power stations. It didn’t run out of coal - and wouldn’t have for a couple of hundred years.
And it wasn’t uneconomic... but how you define that is very much a matter of politics.Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracies will unpack that far better than I can - but I guess you know that already.
But since 1985 there was a deliberate attempt as Billy Elliott playwright Lee Hall has observed, to erase the industry from memory. Communities had to be fragmented - for ideological reasons.
I made a film earlier this year to explore this process. I adapt, very much, the radio-ballad method into what I call a video-ballad. Mining photographer Pierre Gonnord said that whilst the woods would grow back, the human silence would be terrible.The film’s tag is “voicing the human silence”.
Several stellar musicians gave permission for their work to be used - one even specially recorded a song. They all had close connections with the industry, some having parents or grandparents who were miners, and most of the songs were written by miners. Kate Rusby and the Grimethorpe Colliery Band Quintet , The Unthanks, Dick Gaughan, John Tams, Rioghnach Connolly, Jed Grimes all contributed generously.
The film can be viewed via its own website
www.thesefragments.com