Easington Colliery Pit Cage Memorial

Easington Colliery  is the name of a now closed coal mine near Peterlee on the northeast coast  of England but, as often happened in British  mining communities, it is also the name of the village. It was constructed  by the mine owners in the early 20th century, to house the workers at the mine and their families. The mine is long gone and, because  of nationalisation of coal mines in Britain in the 1940s, the mine owners have been gone for much longer but the name attached to the village still remains. The colliery was the last deep mine in the Durham coalfield  to close in 1993. It used  to extend 4 miles under the North Sea. The loss of 1500 miners jobs was a devastating blow to the community and the repercussions remain to this day.

The memorial featured  here is a large artefact from the coal mine which itself is very sculptural and might even be described  as "found art". It is a reconstructed, 3 level, pit cage (or mine elevator car) identical to the one which used to carry plummet down the 1500 ft shaft (and back up again, both in just over a minute). The doors on the lowest level have been removed. The shaft is now capped and the cage sits on top of it within the local nature reserve  that has been created on the site of the old mine's surface workings. As one walks from the nature reserve's  parking lot, up to the cage, on the right hand side of the path is a series of large impressed clay tablets set into the turf showing the  series of geological  strata, including the coal seams, through which the 1500ft shaft was driven in 1899.

Close by is a memorial garden (built by the National  Union of Mineworkers) which can be found, just outside the reserve, next to the junction of Crawlaw Ave and Office Street close to the entrance to the road to the parking lot. The enclosed garden has a pithead winding  wheel laid horizontally within a timber pergola, itself forming the spokes of a wheel. The steel winding wheel is supported by wooden timbers. Crushed coals lie between the spokes of the metal winding wheel forming a growing medium for a variety of plants. The metal work on the gates and on the backs of two benches within the garden  is particularly attractive and between the two metal benches you can clearly see the pit cage on the hill. 

Both these memorials really commemorate the pit itself and the community that relied upon it, rather than the victims of an individual disaster (for that you need to visit the local cemetery). However  the garden opened on 29th May 2001  the  50th anniversary  of the underground (methane) explosion in 1951 that killed 81 men (and boys) who worked at the mine  and two of those involved in the rescue.