Archive that exists to prevent the ‘worst-case scenarios’
IT often takes a disaster for important changes to be made and the mining industry is littered with tragic examples.
Although not in the public consciousness as much as horrors like Aberfan, the events at one Staffordshire mine way in 1872 led to a fundamental piece of reform affecting the entire country, now preserved here in Nottinghamshire.
The morning of November 14 saw a miner unexpectedly strike the boundary of a pit that had previously been sunk in the same area, leading to a huge inrush of water which eventually killed 22 men. Legislation was swiftly passed requiring the owners of abandoned mines to submit detailed plans showing the boundaries of where they had worked.
Such plans were therefore submitted by every single opencast and deep mine from 1872 all over England, Scotland and Wales. Every one of these abandonment plans is now housed at the headquarters of the Coal Authority in Mansfield.
At the building’s mining heritage centre, all 120,000 plans are stacked on shelves in a giant, secure, temperature-controlled room.
A huge advocate for mining history, mining information manager Steve Meredith explained that thes plans were re not kept for nostalgia alone.
“If a developer sees a nice empty field, they might think, ‘I want to build 30 houses on there’. But there might be a reason why it’s still an empty field.”
The passing of the 19th-century law saw abandonment plans beginning to pour in, but there were huge discrepancies in what was submitted. Some plans were sent in on sturdy rolls of paper, others on very brittle cardboard, and pits including the historic Wollaton Colliery submitted abandonment plans so big that they didn’t fit on the shelves – instead, they are leant up against the wall and reach to the ceiling.
The differences in the format and content of plans makes accessing and understanding them incredibly complex, and the 1980s and 90s saw a process of “rationalisation” in which all the plans were standardised into a similar format. The early 2000s then saw Mansfield’s mining heritage centre beginning the painstaking process of scanning every plan, allowing the creation of the digitised National Coal Mining Database. Although dominating the heritage centre, the abandonment plans are by no means the only important slices of history preserved at Mansfield.
Mr Meredith said: “We’ve also got a lot of auxiliary information, a lot of things that were stored in places like the garages of ex-miners. We get asked if we want these things like notebooks and I always say yes, because why wouldn’t we want them?”
Alongside its historical collection, which boasts 84,000 British Coal photographs, the Coal Authority operates a 24-hour hazard helpline.
Members of the public can call to report issues such as gas emissions, an unsealed entrance to a mine or even a ground collapse. All of this work is something which Mr Meredith says cannot be lost, adding: “The pool of people who were down the mines and who understand the mines gets smaller and smaller and, God forbid, if we didn’t preserve this information. It’s those worst-case scenarios that we need to stop.”