Durham is an odd place. Not odd in an exciting way — my kids always called it Dullham. But odd nonetheless.
The city was shaped by two very different forces.
The first is intellectual and religious. Durham is the shrine of Saint Cuthbert and the burial place of the Venerable Bede, home to an ancient cathedral and a modern research university. It is a place where learning, scholarship and theology have been central to civic life for over a thousand years.
The second force was far more practical: craft and graft. Durham City was the capital of the Durham coalfield.
The Durham coalfield was one of the largest and most productive in Britain, stretching from the Tyne to the Tees and inland to the Pennines. Industrial mining expanded rapidly during the nineteenth century as deep pits were sunk beneath the magnesian limestone plateau of east Durham. By the early twentieth century the coalfield supported more than 200 pits and over 150,000 miners, shaping the growth of towns such as Peterlee, Seaham, Easington and Stanley as well as older mining villages across the county. Durham coal powered ships, railways and heavy industry across Britain and was exported worldwide through ports like Seaham and Sunderland.
This created a distinctive political culture. Durham was left-wing, but pragmatic and non-ideological. It valued honesty, solidarity and hard work just as the city’s intellectual tradition valued debate and scholarship.
Much of that disappeared in the 1980s.
After the miners’ strike the coalfields closed, and the physical traces of the industry were quickly removed. A friend who moved to Durham twenty years ago once asked why so many villages across the county had rectangular plantations of non-native conifers on their edges. These, of course, mark the sites of former collieries and spoil heaps, landscaped and planted over until almost nothing remained.
Environmentally this may have been desirable. The county recovered much of its natural beauty. But something important was lost. The past was erased before it could be reflected on and understood.
Durham City gradually lost confidence in how to tell its own story. It is comfortable discussing the eighteenth century but far less comfortable with the 1980s, a period still caught somewhere between trauma and historical amnesia.
For many years there was almost no visible monument in the city to the coalfield that shaped it. In the absence of that history Durham became, increasingly, simply a university city.
One of the few serious attempts to confront this was The Miners’ Hymns, Bill Morrison’s film with music by Jóhann Jóhannsson. The combination of archive footage and Jóhannsson’s extraordinary brass and electronic score created the feeling of something trying to break through from another era — a voice from a past that had not entirely disappeared.
More recently there has been a renewed effort to reconnect the city with that history through the restoration of Redhills.
Redhills, often known as Durham Miners’ Hall, was built in 1915 as the headquarters of the Durham Miners’ Association, one of the most powerful trade unions in the British coalfield. Financed largely through contributions from Durham miners themselves, it became the political and organisational centre of the county’s mining communities. Inside is the historic Pitman’s Parliament, where representatives from pits across the county debated policy and strategy and shaped both local politics and national debates on labour, mining and industrial relations.
I worked at Redhills briefly during the 1992 General Election, in an office with wood-panelled walls, a complete set of Hansard from the 1930s and a coal fire that seemed to burn continuously whether anyone was there or not.
It was in the committee room at Redhills that the Durham NUM voted on whether to join the national miners’ strike. The vote was tied. The chairman, who opposed the strike, had the casting vote — but voted in favour because the committee rules required the chair to support the motion in the event of a tie.
Even now Redhills still seems slightly uncertain of its role in the city. Its story sits uneasily in a place that largely forgot the coalfields except for one day a year when, soaked in beer, the brass bands march again at the Gala.
That confusion is not helped by attempts within parts of the Labour movement to claim the Gala, the Durham NUM and the county’s labour tradition as their own. Durham mining politics was left-wing but rarely ideological. It was rooted in practical self-help, tight-knit communities and a deep suspicion of abstract middle-class political theories.
Redhills will take time to find its feet again. It cannot simply be a museum of the past. Its role must be to reconnect the city with the history that shaped it. And that task will be harder with a Reform Council whose idea of history doesn’t extend beyond 1 world cup and 2 world wars.
Next year marks the centenary of the General Strike. The unions today are shadows of what they once were — though that is true of almost all our civic institutions. We rarely join anything anymore beyond a streaming service or a gym membership we will never use.
We do not participate. We do not organise.
If Redhills succeeds, it will not be because it preserves nostalgia. It will be because it creates a place where people come together again.
