Digging the Seam: Popular Cultures of the 1984/5 Miners Strike

The 1984-5 Miners' Strike was one of the most profoundly important political events in British social history. It was an event that polarised public opinion, divided nation and families alike and the results in terms of the destruction of centuries of industrial and cultural tradition are still keenly felt today, over a quarter of a century later. The idea for this book, and the conference that preceded it was the rapidly approaching 25th anniversary of the strike and the culmination of two BBC/AHRC funded projects that had been looking at archival news reports of the dispute. The people that we had been working with on this project were framed in this archival record - frozen in a cultural moment. Their experiences, stories and histories were contained in several hundred hours of footage held by the BBC and largely unseen or unquestioned since their original transmission during the long year of the strike. Watching this material in preparation for the research we were about to undertake led us to think more and more about the role of popular culture in relation to the strike and the communities it had so dramatically affected. The material evoked memories that had perhaps begun to fade and awakened a renewed interest in the social and cultural dimension of the strike and the cultural legacy it had produced. The social and political consequences of this dispute, which have resonated for the past quarter century, have been subject to detailed analysis and reflection. The consequences for the arts and popular culture were less clearly mapped. This book attempts to begin to redress the focus and signal the importance of popular cultural activity both during and after the strike. The subsequent conference, which forms the basis of this book, took place at Leeds University in March 2010, marking the 25th anniversary of the end of the year-long strike. This anniversary seemed to provide a perfect opportunity to reflect on the legacy of the dispute and to explore the role of culture and the cultural industries within this important context. The conference approached these issues through two main strands. It firstly examined cultural representations of the strike and broader mining culture through popular forms such as literature, music, dance, theatre, performance, photography, television and cinema. It considered how popular culture had recorded and represented the strike and its associated cultures in the intervening 25 years as well as its role in the preservation of particular traditions, memories and practices in a new post industrial society. Secondly it reflected on the relationships between the strike and cultural production. It considered how cultural producers in forms such as music, painting, photography, theatre and cinema responded and contributed to the strike and how cultural producers have actively (re)constructed meanings of the strike in the intervening years. Arguably, the defeat of the miners hastened the onset of various forms of policy, aimed at regenerating post-industrial communities through information and cultural industries and this was also a key consideration, especially in respect to the growing debates about cultural ownership, heritage and memorialisation. The selection of papers that appear in this book represent a small cross section of the presentations that formed the conference that covered an incredibly rich field of approach that included: cultural and industrial identity, political theatre, folk traditions, popular music and the strike, documentary film and photography, storytelling and testimony, the cultural industries, digital resources and the strike, archives and the re-construction of cultural memory, painting, arts activism, the political novel, poetry and protest and culture as memory. In selecting material for inclusion we wanted to ensure that we captured the full ra