WHEN I was growing up in North Derbyshire, we all knew a good joke. “Why did the village cross the road?” Actually, it was a bad joke — it didn’t even have a punchline. 

The village was Arkwright, a former mining community just down the hill from where I lived, in Dennis Skinner’s constituency. 

Six months after Arkwright colliery closed in 1988, a leak of methane gas was discovered in a fireplace and villagers were evacuated from their houses. 

Knowing the likely source of the leak, villagers tried to claim compensation from British Coal but were refused. 

Two years later in 1990, British Coal continued to deny liability, but offered to build a new village on the other side of the road. 

In return, they wanted planning permission for a 10-year programme to open-cast mine four million tons of coal from a 1,000-acre site immediately around both the new and old Arkwright. 

Apart from the noise and pollution, opencasting seemed to undermine the original argument used to justify pit closure — the idea that the market for coal was shrinking. 

Open-casting, of course, is also less labour intensive than deep mining, relying more on machinery than people. 

Skinner refused to support the proposal and urged the villagers to try to fight British Coal in court. 

But faced with the choice between another long court battle — and the threat of legal costs if they lost — and brand new homes, the Arkwright residents took the option that would give them most security.

My memories of growing up near Arkwright are full of the sights and sounds of open-casting, the heavy machinery and the strange chasm in the land. But I didn’t know what the word meant when I was a kid, of course. Nor “landfill.” Nor “methane.” 

I was watching an aftermath that I wouldn’t understand until years later. 

I do remember, for some reason, that there used to be two beautiful, stately trees in the fields where Arkwright village now stands. My dad loved them. Every time we walked past he’d point them out. I can remember what they looked like, though I can’t remember what old Arkwright was like.

I’m writing this in June 2014 in the immediate wake of a new report published by Professor Steve Fothergill and colleagues at Sheffield Hallam University about the state of former coalfields 30 years on from the miners’ strike. 

The Derbyshire Times reported on its findings last week, and I doubt they’d be a surprise to any of the paper’s readers. The report found a “disturbing” situation for areas across the country hit by the 1984 strike, including former pit villages in the Chesterfield and Bolsover areas. 

In North Derbyshire coalfield communities, 7.6 per cent of people suffer from bad or very bad health compared to the national average of 5.6 per cent. 

There are just 61 jobs for every 100 people in the same areas compared to a national average of 67. And 38 per cent of coalfield neighbourhoods in North Derbyshire are among the most deprived 30 per cent in Britain. 

Professor Fothergill put it bluntly and succinctly: “The miners’ strike of 1984/85 may now be receding into history but the job losses that followed in its wake are still part of the everyday economic reality of most mining communities.”

The Coalfields Regeneration Trust has poured significant sums of money into these communities — the CRT has received more than £100 million since 1999 from local government and other sources. How much will it take to get them back on their feet? 

The problem, 30 years on, isn’t just that the legacy of pit closure has been economically devastating. The damage lies in people’s hearts and minds too. Running a creative writing workshop with 12-year-old pupils in Shirebrook recently, I was struck by how much students this young knew about the strike, how quick they were to talk about the devastating effects on their community. These Year 7s are third generation — it was their grandparents rather than their parents who worked in the pits. 

But when the discussion turned to Shirebrook’s past, they all clamoured at once to talk about Maggie Thatcher and how she shut down the mines. Then some of them talked about how “everything burns down or shuts round here.” 

There was bleakness in the poems they wrote too, portraits of a place where things had changed for the worse, where there were few opportunities. But their writing itself was brimming with life, energy and intelligence. 

I’d spent a day with a room full of bright, articulate young people who knew the history of their area and knew what people were battling against in a strike that happened decades before they were born. 

They might be suffering from some of the damage inflicted by pit closure 30 years on, but at least they know what the miners were fighting for.

Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter.
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