Two sets of photographs 24 hours apart.
One was at the Durham Miners’ Gala. The other was in Horden, a former pit village a few miles from where I grew up.
At first glance they seem to tell completely different stories. One is a celebration of brass bands, banners and working-class history. The other has become a symbol of industrial decline and Britain’s housing crisis.
But really they are the same story.
People often ask what the point of the Miners’ Gala is, decades after the last pit closed. Usually those questions come from people who are uncomfortable with its public display of left-wing politics.
The answer is straightforward. Some call it community, others solidarity or civil society. They are different words for much the same thing: people coming together collectively to celebrate what they have achieved, support one another through difficult times and confront future challenges.
Every shade of left-wing opinion is represented at the Gala, but community itself doesn’t belong to any political faction. It is an older tradition than any modern ideology: politics rooted in people rather than policies. I don’t much care for the stalls displaying support for Vladimir Putin, but I was considerably more surprised to discover quite how many euphonium players County Durham appears to possess.
I grew up in East Durham. In 1984 I changed schools and commuted into Durham each morning on a battered Vespa scooter. Shortly afterwards the first miners returned to work at Easington Colliery. Every morning I found myself passing convoys of police travelling in the opposite direction. The strike shaped the county I grew up in, even for those of us who were too young to take part.
That history still hangs over East Durham, but history alone cannot explain the present.
This was my second visit to Horden in recent months. The first was to watch a performance of Hamlet in the remarkable community theatre supported by Sir Ian McKellen. I returned because a reader of this blog contacted me about the growing use of cheap housing in East Durham by London boroughs seeking temporary accommodation for homeless households.
Horden has acquired an unenviable reputation in the national press.
Yet the place I found bore little resemblance to the caricature.
Most of the town consists of neat terraces and tidy bungalows. There is a beautiful park, a Ray Londsdale sculpture, acres of well-kept allotments and one of the finest cricket squares I have seen outside first-class cricket. Some people were understandably cautious about talking to a stranger with a camera, but many more were friendly, particularly over a pint. More than once I was proudly informed that another blogger had been chased out of town after describing Horden as “the worst place in Britain.”
But it wasn’t hard to find the streets that the BBC and the Guardian had written about:
Every council in England has a legal duty to house people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. In places where housing is scarce and expensive, particularly London, councils increasingly rely on accommodation hundreds of miles away. Former mining communities in County Durham have become one destination because they still contain some of the cheapest private rented housing in the country.
A Freedom of Information request to Durham County Council reveals the scale of the issue. Since records began under the Homelessness Reduction Act, the number of households accommodated by the council has risen from 199 in 2018/19 to around 450 in 2025/26, peaking at 484 the previous year. At the time of the request, around 100 households remained in temporary accommodation within County Durham.
The data also shows that placements are heavily concentrated in the county’s former pit villages and lower-cost housing markets. The largest numbers were in the DH6 postcode area (which includes Coxhoe, Bowburn and surrounding villages), followed by Stanley, Durham City and Chester-le-Street. East Durham features in the figures through Horden, Peterlee, Blackhall and Wingate, but the issue is clearly wider than a single town. It reflects the geography of cheap private rented housing across the county rather than an isolated local phenomenon.
| Postcode | Main places covered | Households placed |
|---|---|---|
| DH6 | Bowburn, Coxhoe, Thornley, Kelloe, Sherburn Hill | 780 |
| DH9 | Stanley, Annfield Plain, Tanfield | 463 |
| DH1 | Durham City, Framwellgate Moor, Belmont | 449 |
| DH2 | Chester-le-Street, Pelton, Ouston | 307 |
| DL5 | Newton Aycliffe | 175 |
| DH3 | Great Lumley, Birtley, Chester-le-Street south | 126 |
| DH7 | Brandon, Langley Moor, Ushaw Moor | 108 |
| DL16 | Spennymoor | 107 |
| TS21 | Sedgefield, Fishburn | 97 |
| DL14 | Bishop Auckland | 87 |
| SR8 | Peterlee, Horden | 37 |
| DL15 | Crook | 31 |
| DL17 | Ferryhill | 19 |
| DH8 | Consett | 16 |
| DL4 | Shildon | 15 |
| SR7 | Seaham | 15 |
| DH5 | Hetton-le-Hole | 9 |
| TS27 | Blackhall, Castle Eden | 6 |
| TS29 | Wingate | 5 |
| DL13 | Weardale | 5 |
| TS28 | Haswell | 5 |
| DH4 | Houghton-le-Spring (county area) | 3 |
There is one important caveat. These figures are cumulative rather than a snapshot of current placements. But that tells us something too. It suggests a remarkably high turnover of households moving through temporary accommodation.
I have no objection to housing homeless families. Every community has a responsibility to help people in need. The difficulty is that it becomes much harder to build lasting communities when there is constant movement of people in and out of neighbourhoods. Civil society depends upon continuity.
It was obvious that many of those being temporarily housed in Horden were refugees. Contrary to the mythology of social media, they did not resemble an invading army. They looked instead like tired families and young men trying to rebuild their lives, many of whom appeared to have endured considerable hardship before arriving in County Durham. Most of them couldn’t fight sleep.
There was another side to Horden that was much harder to photograph. Fast cars. Tattooed young men. Steroid muscle. Warnings about drug dogs in pubs. Leaflets advertising addiction services. I lived in Liverpool in the 80s and I know what a drugs dealer looks lilke.
There was always a degree of machismo in mining communities; men who spent their lives underground had little time for bookish teenagers like me. But without the pits, part of that culture has curdled into something more brittle and destructive. Drugs and organised crime felt like a far bigger story than refugees living in temporary accommodation, and a much bigger problem for East Durham. Fixing the housing market is easier than eradicating drugs gangs once they take hold.
As I travelled around the east coast of England earlier this year, visiting places that had voted Reform, I kept noticing three recurring characteristics.
The first was economic; places with more workers than non-workers voted Labour. Places with more non-workers than workers voted Conservative or Reform. The bigger the imbalance the more likely the town was to vote Reform.
The second was geographical. They often sat away from the country’s main transport routes. Great Yarmouth is an obvious example. Horden is only a few miles from Durham, yet travelling there by public transport involves changing trains via Newcastle, while the direct bus service is minimal and under threat.
The third, and perhaps most important, was civil society. The places most resistant to populism tended to be those where people still belonged to clubs, societies, sports teams, churches, brass bands and community organisations. Where those institutions had weakened, politics increasingly became something experienced online rather than in the real world.
And Horden has a bit of both.
The town still turns out proudly behind its banners at the Miners’ Gala. Yet it has also elected Reform councillors, as have many neighbouring former mining communities across East Durham.
That contradiction is worth thinking about.
The Gala represents one understanding of community: solidarity based on shared experience, collective action and mutual support. Modern populism offers another: belonging based on grievance, cultural identity and hostility towards outsiders. Both appeal to people’s desire to belong, but they point in very different directions.
Walking around the Gala, then walking around Horden the following day, I realised I had been looking at the same community from two different angles.
The banners celebrate a tradition that believes society is strongest when people stand together. Horden reminds us how difficult it has become to sustain that tradition when industries disappear, housing markets are transformed, populations become more transient and much of public life moves online.
If we want to understand why places like Horden vote as they do, we should probably spend less time arguing about ideology and more time asking what has happened to the institutions that once held communities together.
Because when civil society weakens, something else always replaces it.
