Forgotten Coal Mine, England

This Forgotten Coal Mine is an abandoned industrial relic in England. This colliery once extracted hundreds of thousands of tonnes of coal every year, from numerous shafts hundreds of meters deep connected to tens of miles of subterranean tunnels.

Exploring an abandoned colliery

I explored this location in 2020, during a severe weather warning (probably not the best time to be climbing about on roofs!). I was lucky enough to get inside many of the buildings during this all-day visit; the power house, winding house, pit pony stables, museum building, shower rooms, changing rooms and the old canteen.

History of the Forgotten Coal Mine

The first coal was mined here in the 1200s, albeit on a small scale. Industrial coal mining began in this region in the mid-1800s. Shafts were enlarged, deepened, and sunk throughout the second part of the 19th century. Modernization brought this coal mine’s Golden Age in the early 20th century. Previously, all of the coal had been extracted by workers using manual tools. By 1920, air shakers, conveyor belts, and electric coal-cutting instruments had replaced much of the manual labour. Production rose briefly.

The 1920s and 1930s were challenging years in England, particularly for people working in the coal mining sector. There were both miners’ and general workers’ strikes in the 1920s, which hit this colliery hard. When the UK entered the Great Depression in the 1930s, things only got worse. As a result, hundreds of miners lost their jobs.  As the nation began to recover from the Great Depression in the late 1930s, the colliery persevered and prospered. At the time, the mine employed over 3,000 miners and generated record-breaking volumes of coal. 

Closure of the colliery, and a second life as a museum

In the late 1950s, the UK coal mining sector began to decline. Up until now, the preferred fuel was coal, but cheap fuel oil imported from overseas was beginning to take its place. Older coal mines that could no longer profitably extract deeper coal closed first. This coal mine’s shafts gradually stopped producing coal one by one over the course of several years. By the 1960s, coal extraction was half what it was during the post-Great Depression boom. The colliery struggled on for another two decades before closing in the middle of the 1970s.

The colliery was turned into a museum featuring an underground mining exhibit and functional machinery 200m below ground . Tens of thousands of people visited the mine annually. Due to methane gas concerns, the underground museum closed in the 1980s. Also, the cost of running the pumps that kept the underground display from getting flooded was too much for the museum to afford. The underground part of the museum was moved to a new, shallow mine that was specifically built for tours and was securely cut off from the old mine. Sadly, the museum shut down in the middle of the 1990s. The site is now owned by a trust, but its future plans for the site are uncertain.

Photos go through the various areas/buildings in the order I visited them; the power house, winding house, pit pony stables, museum building, shower rooms, changing rooms and the old canteen.