Colliery Landscapes

The exploitation of coal was fundamental to Britain's emergence as the first modern industrial power. The visual impact of the coal industry on the landscape was, and still is, enormous. Yet by the early 1980s when the future of coal mining in Britain came into question again, hardly any efforts had been made to document the industrial archaelogy of this mainstay of the British economy. In 1992 English Heritage commissioned from the Royal Commission on the Historic Monuments of England a photographic aerial survey of the English colleries. This book records the country's deep-mined coal industry at a time of radical restructuring and documents the technological and structural developments of the industry, the visible surface features which have characterized the landscapes of the coalfields of England.