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AN evocative statue of a miner with his heart torn out is to be placed in a former mining community which was home to Europe’s biggest coalmine.
Sculptor Ray Lonsdale, who lives in County Durham, was inspired by the region’s former mining communities whose hearts were ripped out by the closures of their pits after the 1984-85 miners’ strike.
It is to be placed in a park in the former pit village of Horden in the Durham coalfield.
Mr Lonsdale told the Star: “I was born in a pit village, then I moved to another pit village, then another, but none of them had a pit.
“But my driving force was not just the pits. I felt that the country has been hollowed out of its skills and heavy industry.
“We saw the shipyards close, then the mines. It is a comment on the loss of our heavy industry.”
The statue, entitled: “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more,” has been bought by Horden Parish Council.
Horden colliery was sunk in 1900. By the 1930s it employed 4,000 miners but was closed by the Tories in 1987.
