The meanings of coal community in Britain since 1947

This article offers an original contribution to the literature on coal communities and the history of the coal industry in Britain by examining changes and contested interests within Britain’s coal territories since nationalisation in 1947. The analysis is organised around three distinct but over-lapping meanings of coal community: economic locality, ideological communality and occupational group. As economic localities mining communities became stronger in the 1960s, even as the coal industry itself was shrinking, but then less viable as all forms of industrial employment dwindled in the 1980s. In ideological terms coal communities were divided by gender as well as class, but became more cohesive with social change and greater opportunities for women. A network of increasingly solid localities contributed—despite the divisions of 1984–1985 and subsequent job losses—to the strengthening of a national occupational community, partly because deindustrialisation was a common working class disaster that transcended regional boundaries