Mining & Screen

British mining has been filmed from two directions: by people recording a colliery because it was closing, and by people borrowing one because a pit is the most convincing place to set an underground story. Both leave a record of a real mine at a real date. This category collects film and television work with a specific, sourced connection to a named colliery, workforce or mining community — the mine that was filmed, not a general resemblance to industrial landscape.

Records

Above Us the Earth	Karl Francis filmed the closing of Ogilvie Colliery as it happened in 1975 and cut the footage together with staged scenes played by the men it was happening to. The result is a documentary drama that blames the National Coal Board and the unions in roughly equal measure, and is now held in the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales.
Alien 3 at Dawdon Colliery	David Fincher's Alien 3 filmed the opening scenes of its prison planet, Fiorina 'Fury' 161, on Blast Beach at Dawdon, near Seaham, a shore built up from the waste that Dawdon Colliery and its neighbours tipped over the cliffs.
Billy Elliot	Stephen Daldry's 2000 film about a miner's son who takes up ballet during the 1984–85 strike, set in the fictional County Durham village of 'Everington' and shot mostly in Easington Colliery, with about 400 villagers as extras; with Easington's own pit closed, the mining scenes were filmed at Ellington and Lynemouth in Northumberland.
Brassed Off	Mark Herman's 1996 film about a colliery brass band in 'Grimley', a Yorkshire pit village whose colliery is balloted into closure while the band plays its way to the national championship. The story follows Grimethorpe's own 1992, when the colliery was named for closure four days before its band won the National Championship; the film was largely shot in Grimethorpe, and the Grimethorpe Colliery Band made up most of the on-screen band and played the whole soundtrack.
First live television broadcast from a coal mine, 1952	BBC Scotland's 'Other People's Jobs: The Miner' went out live from the coalface of Tillicoultry Mine in Clackmannanshire on 25 November 1952, the first live television broadcast from underground in a coal mine. Fourteen miners took part, filmed by four cameras manhandled to a three-foot seam.
Germinal (BBC 2, 1970)	Germinal (1970), a five-part BBC serial of Zola's novel of a coalfield strike in northern France, with Mark Jones and Rosemary Leach, was filmed in 1969 at the derelict Waldridge Colliery near Chester-le-Street, whose pithead was blown up for the climax.
Get Carter (1971)	Mike Hodges's gangster film Get Carter (1971), with Michael Caine as Jack Carter, ends on the beach below Blackhall Colliery, black with the waste the colliery's overhead conveyor tipped into the sea: Carter kills his last man there and dumps the body in a spoil bucket before he is himself shot on the shore.
Pride (2014 film)	Pride (2014), directed by Matthew Warchus, tells the story of the London group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners and the Welsh mining village of Onllwyn in the Dulais Valley, whose strike support group took their help in 1984-85 and became their friends.
The Brave Don't Cry	The Brave Don't Cry (1952), directed by Philip Leacock for John Grierson's Group 3, is a feature film of the Knockshinnoch Castle Colliery disaster of September 1950, when liquid peat broke into the workings at New Cumnock and more than a hundred men were trapped. Made in documentary style with Glasgow Citizens Theatre actors and the National Coal Board's help, it premiered before an audience of miners at the Edinburgh Film Festival.
The Green Death	Doctor Who came to Ogilvie Colliery in March 1973 to film a story about a South Wales pit where miners die glowing green of chemical waste piped underground. The National Coal Board let the crew work the surface and ride the men's own cages down the shaft, two years before the colliery closed.
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1932 film)	Gainsborough Pictures' first sound film of The Hound of the Baskervilles, directed by Gareth Gundrey with Robert Rendel as Holmes, was shot on Dartmoor in early 1931, and its unit went to Foggintor Quarry near Princetown for the moorland scenes with the Hound, the fights and a car crash.
The New Mine (1945 film)	A seventeen-minute British Council film of 1945, directed by Irene Wilson for GB Instructional, that showed the world Comrie Colliery in Fife as the model of a modern British pit, from the miners' canteen and lamp room to the coalface, the washery and the pithead baths.
The Price of Coal	Barry Hines and Ken Loach's two-part BBC Play for Today of 1977, set at the fictional Milton Colliery near Barnsley: a comedy of the preparations for a royal visit, then, a month later, the explosion underground that follows the pit's shortcuts. It was filmed around the disused colliery at Thorpe Hesley, near Rotherham.
Things to Come filming at South Griffin Colliery, 1935	In May 1935 the derelict South Griffin Colliery at Blaina was the location for the attack on 'the Hill People' in Alexander Korda's Things to Come, from H. G. Wells, whose first treatment was called 'Whither Mankind?'. Two hundred local ex-servicemen and Territorial Army men were hired as extras.

Mining and screen

Two ways a colliery reaches the screen

Ogilvie Colliery in the Darran valley was filmed twice in the last years of its life, and the two occasions are as different as the reasons for filming a mine can be. In March 1973 the BBC brought Doctor Who there to stand in for a fictional South Wales pit, and the National Coal Board let the crew work around the surface and ride the miners' own cages down the shaft. Two years later, as the Board closed the colliery for good, Karl Francis filmed the closure itself and the argument around it, using the men it was happening to alongside professional actors.

The distinction matters for what each is worth as a record. A drama that borrows a colliery preserves its surface and its working gear on a dated afternoon, whatever the story wrapped around it; a documentary made at a closure preserves what the people there said while it was happening. Both founding records of this category are attached to the same mine, and the mine outlived neither of them by long: Ogilvie closed in April 1975 and its ground is now a country park.

What this category admits

The bar is the archive's ordinary one. A named colliery, workforce or community, established from a source rather than inferred from scenery. A film set in an unnamed pit village does not qualify; a film shot at a named colliery, or about a named closure, does. Where a production used a mine as a location, the record says which mine, when, and what was filmed there, because that is the part this archive is for.

A third record: the village and the working pit

Billy Elliot (2000) added a third case in September 2026, and it combines both directions. Its story is set in the 1984–85 strike in a fictional County Durham pit village, which was filmed in Easington Colliery six years after that pit closed, with around 400 villagers as extras. Because Easington could no longer supply a working mine, the mining scenes were shot at Ellington and Lynemouth in Northumberland, and further scenes in Dawdon.

A fourth record: the band and the pit

Brassed Off (1996) is the reverse of Billy Elliot's case: a fictional Yorkshire village, Grimley, standing for a real one. Its story follows Grimethorpe's 1992, when the colliery was named for closure four days before its band won the National Championship, and it was largely filmed in Grimethorpe in 1995 with the Grimethorpe Colliery Band as most of the on-screen band and the whole of the soundtrack.

Sources

(secondary) A Grimethorpe Story — Grimethorpe Colliery Band
(secondary) Above Us the Earth (1977) — BFI Player
(secondary) Billy Elliot — Wikipedia
(secondary) Brassed Off — Wikipedia
(secondary) Darran Valley Country Park (formerly Ogilvie Colliery) — The Locations Guide to Doctor Who
(secondary) Easington Colliery — Wikipedia
(secondary) The Green Death — Wikipedia

Category page created: 11 September 2026 · Last researched: 11 September 2026