Silverwood Colliery during the 1980s

Clearing through some old videos recently I uncovered a corporate video made for Silverwood Colliery in the late 1980s.

Silverwood Colliery was a coal mine that began life at the start of the 20th Century and the community around it is where I lived, played as a child and grew into adulthood.

My grandfather was a deputy there, and a lot of my family on my mother’s side worked there too until the pit was closed as part of the Conservative government’s pit closure programme of the 1990s.

The land where Silverwood Colliery itself stood and the coal slag pile and slurry lake next to it have since been converted into a nature reserve and a large, modern housing estate sits on what was once farmland next to the colliery.

It’s interesting to see this footage and, once you get past the corporate, promotional voice-over, it’s equally interesting to consider what the place looks like now.

My family and personal history is wedded to the area – I remember watching the miners picketing outside the pit in the 1984 coal strike, and I spent a lot of time playing as a child in and around the woodlands where Silverwood Colliery was located.

The grassed coal piles were a favourite walking place too – the blackened hills of coal slag held a kind of strange mystery for me. They resembled the mountains of Mordor but the variety of wildlife there gave the landscape a strange kind of beauty. I have some photos of that land somewhere that I might dig out.

Meanwhile enjoy the video, cheesy as it is!

Update 28/5/2024 – Neil Bingham’s excellent Silverwood Colliery Heritage Group on Facebook has a much more detailed history about the pit and the people and community that form it’s history.