The University of Birmingham is hosting a one-day event titled Remembering Coal: Legacy, Memories, Heritage to mark its links with the mining industry.

The event takes place on Monday 16 June,  from 10 am to 6.30 pm at the Arts Building (Level 1, LR1), Edgbaston campus. The event is free to attend and can be viewed online subject to registration.

Download the full conference programme and booking information.

This year marks the university’s 125th anniversary but also a decade since Britain’s last deep coal mine closed. A century ago more than one million workers were directly employed in the winning of coal, facing a range of underground hazards from gas, dust, injury or entrapment.

Once the demand for domestic coal started to fall in the 1950s the number of pits declined sharply. Nevertheless, at the start of the 1984-85 strike the National Coal Board still employed some 250,000 workers. The industry’s rapid demise thereafter was to prefigure wider political debates and environmental concerns with the gradual shift to renewable energy sources.

The changing fortunes of Britain’s coal is reflected in the University of Birmingham’s links to the industry through its former Mining Department (1902-1966), which is being showcased in a Coal on Campus exhibition. The department’s vocational teaching approach was considered radical for the time and even included building a model mine beneath the Edgbaston site in 1905.

Ultimately the Mining Department was overtaken by the growing focus on oil and petrochemical processing, as imported oil increasingly replaced domestic coal as a preferred (cheaper) fuel. The Mining Department was subsumed into a new School of Chemical Engineering in 1966 which continues today.

Organisers: Robert Rayner (MRes History), Georgina Rowe (PhD English), Mia Kalogjera (PhD Civil Eng.). Event sponsor: Birmingham Research Institute for History and Cultures (BRIHC).

Event partner: Centre for West Midlands History and Cultures.

Programme

10.00 – 10.15 Welcome: opening of the Coal on Campus exhibition, Arts Building, Level 1.

10.15 – 10.45  Screening of In The Veins (2024), a short film tracing the changing fortunes of

Britain’s coal industry during the twentieth century.

11.00 – 1.00  Panel Session 1 – Memories, legacy and heritage.

Moderator:  Dr Malcolm Dick, UoB Honorary Associate Professor and former Director of the Centre for West Midlands History

Speakers: 1. Dr John Tanner (Head of Masterplan & Capital Projects, National

Mining Museum, England).  2. Dr Mike Nevell (Industrial Heritage Support Officer for England. Industrial buildings, landscape archaeologist, editor and author).

3. Dr Pierre Botcherby (Co-Director, Warwick University Oral History Network.-

Memories of Binley colliery project).  4. Dr Ann-Marie Foster* (Chancellor’s Fellow, Gray’s School of Art, ‘disasters, remembrance and commemoration’).

1.00 – 2.30  LUNCH for panel participants.

2.00 – 2.30  (Optional) The Big Hewer (1961), a chance to listen to the radio-ballad about

Britain’s coal miners by Ewan MacColl, Charles Parker and Peggy Seeger >>> leading into Panel Session 2.

2.30 – 4.30  Panel Session 2 – Hidden voices, storytelling and engagement.

Moderator: Robert Rayner (MRes History)

Speakers: 1. David Amos (former miner, heritage officer, author and co-founder of the Mine2Minds Education project).  2. Lucy Grace (Midlands4Cities PhD candidate, creative writing projects, Coalscapes and Coalships). 3. Chris Arnot (journalist and author of Britain’s Lost Mines, 2013) 4. Rebecca Sills* (filmmaker

and producer of Regeneration, 2024).  5. Nicola Pollard (Up The Road Theatre,

producer of Beneath the Banner, 2023).

4.30 – 5.15    Networking: soft refreshments/biscuits outside screening room.

5.15 – 6.30 Screening of Regeneration (2024), a documentary film that explores the end of

the mining industry and its impact on the landscape and communities it left behind.

*Speaking via Zoom. Programme subject to change.