Mining & Art

British mining produced art in two directions at once: pitmen who painted the world they worked in, and artists who came to the coalfields to paint it from outside. Alongside both ran the lodge banners, the largest body of commissioned public art the industry ever owned. This category collects records with a specific, sourced mining connection — a named colliery, workforce, institution or site — not a general resemblance to industrial subject matter.

Records

The Angel of the North	Antony Gormley's Angel of the North stands on the reclaimed site of Team Colliery above Gateshead, where coal was worked from the 1720s. Gateshead Council approached Gormley, who was initially reluctant and agreed after visiting the ground; he has said the mining done beneath the site gives it a poetic resonance, men having worked below in the dark where the sculpture now stands in the light. It was raised in February 1998 and is seen by an estimated thirty-three million people a year.

Mining and art

The pitmen painters

The best-known body of British mining art was made by miners. In 1927 the Ashington branch of the Workers' Educational Association advertised a class on evolution; after working through other subjects the members settled on art appreciation, and the WEA and Durham University found them a tutor, the painter Robert Lyon. The men — most of them employed at Woodhorn and Ellington collieries — quickly grew dissatisfied with being lectured at, and Lyon suggested they try painting instead, as a way of understanding what they were being shown.

They met from 1934 to 1983. By 1936 they had drawn up an extensive set of rules and named themselves the Ashington Group, holding their first exhibition at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle; a second followed in 1938 as an extension of the Mass Observation project, and by the early 1940s they had shown in London. Henry Moore and Julian Trevelyan praised their work and Helen Sutherland collected it. Interest waned after the war and the men went on meeting weekly regardless, for another four decades. The critic William Feaver met Oliver Kilbourn in the early 1970s and revived attention; in the 1980s the Group's permanent collection became the first exhibition of western art shown in China after the Cultural Revolution. The hut was demolished in 1983, Kilbourn put the paintings in trust before his death in 1993, and they are held today at Woodhorn. Feaver's book on the Group was adapted by Lee Hall as the play The Pitmen Painters.

County Durham had its own version at the Spennymoor Settlement, whose art school was known as the Pitman's Academy. Norman Cornish joined it at fifteen, having started work underground at fourteen in 1933, and went on painting the pit rows, the bars and the men walking to work for the rest of his life; he did not leave mining to paint full time until 1966, more than thirty years after he started. Herbert Dees, Robert Heslop and Tom McGuinness came out of the same institution. What distinguishes this work from most industrial art is simply that its makers were not visiting.

Painters who came to the coalfields

Others arrived from outside and stayed. Josef Herman, a Polish-Jewish refugee who saw himself in a line of European painters of working people running back through Courbet, Millet and Van Gogh, went to Ystradgynlais in the Swansea valley in 1944 for a fortnight and remained eleven years, becoming enough a part of the village to be called Joe Bach. Commissioned in 1951 to paint a mural for the Festival of Britain, he painted six miners resting above ground after their shift, and afterwards called it the most important picture he did in Wales. He left in 1955 because the damp was ruining his health, and took the Gold Medal for Fine Art at the National Eisteddfod in 1962.

Banners

The largest body of art the industry commissioned for itself hangs, once a year, from poles. Each lodge of the miners' union had its banner, carried behind a brass band; at the Durham Miners' Gala they are marched to the old racecourse and new ones are blessed in the cathedral. Their imagery is a record of what the coalfields thought about themselves: miners' leaders and politicians, and at Chopwell — 'Little Moscow' — the only banner to carry both Marx and Lenin, an earlier version of which toured the Soviet Union in 1935 and has not come back. Alongside the socialism runs scripture doing the same work, most often the Good Samaritan with 'Go ye, and do likewise' beneath it. A banner is replaced rather than retired, so a single lodge's successive banners record how its politics and its losses changed.

Monuments on the ground the pits left

The last category is the newest: art placed on reclaimed colliery ground, where the subject is the absence of the industry rather than its work. The largest is the Angel of the North, which stands on the reclaimed site of Team Colliery above Gateshead — a connection Gormley made explicit, and the reason it appears in this archive at all. These works are not made by miners or commissioned by lodges, and they raise a question the earlier categories do not: who a monument on a colliery site is for, once the people who worked it are gone.

Sources

(secondary) Angel of the North — Wikipedia
(secondary) Ashington Group — Wikipedia
(secondary) Durham Miners' Gala — Wikipedia
(secondary) Josef Herman — Wikipedia
(secondary) Norman Cornish — Wikipedia

Category page created: 4 September 2026 · Last researched: 4 September 2026