At the start of 1984 Britain still had a deep coal industry. Within ten years almost all of it had gone. I mapped every deep mine that was working that year, found the towns that grew up around them, and compared those towns in the 2021 Census with towns of the same size, in the same regions, that never had a pit.
The great miners' strike began on 6 March 1984, with a walkout at Cortonwood Colliery in South Yorkshire, and ended a year later, on 3 March 1985. Wikipedia's article on the strike says 173 pits were still working in 1984. The last deep mine in Britain, Kellingley in North Yorkshire, closed on 18 December 2015.
The strike is still argued over, and this page does not take sides on it. My question is a narrower one, and it can be put to data. Forty years on, do the places that lived by the pits still look different from other places? And if they do, does it matter whether their pit closed in the first wave after the strike or held on into this century?
The answer is a clear yes to the first question and, more surprisingly, mostly no to the second. But there is an important catch: the coalfields were different from other places long before 1984, and my data cannot see that far back.
There is no single open list of the pits working in 1984, so I built one. For Yorkshire, Wikipedia's List of collieries in Yorkshire (1984 to 2015) gives every pit and its closure year. For the rest of England, Wales and Scotland I used the Northern Mine Research Society's tables of the National Coal Board's collieries, keeping every colliery that closed in 1984 or later, and checked the years against Wikipedia's lists for Derbyshire and the United Kingdom. Where both give a year, they agree exactly for 81% of 77 pits and within a year for 90%; where they differ I use Wikipedia's year, since anyone can check it.
That gives 196 colliery units: 151 in England, 35 in Wales and 10 in Scotland. It runs a little above the 173 usually quoted, because some combined mines appear under more than one name. I placed 37 pits at a colliery mapped in OpenStreetMap, 64 at their Wikidata entry and the other 95 at the village or town the pit was named for.
Search for a town, or press play to watch the coalfields go dark. Pits are black while they work and turn red in the year they close. Switch to "Towns today" to see which towns had a pit and how they look now.
The closures came fast. The worst single year was 1985, the year the strike ended, when 32 of the pits closed; 57 went in 1985 and 1986 together. A second wave followed from 1988 to 1994, including the programme announced in October 1992, which brought 36 closures in 1992 to 1994. By the end of 1994, when the industry was privatised, 167 of the 196 pits had gone (85%). The remaining 29 closed one by one over the next twenty years, the last three in 2015: Hatfield, Thoresby and Kellingley.
Wales lost its pits a little sooner than England: 49% of the Welsh pits in my list had closed by the end of 1987, against 36% of the English ones. Nottinghamshire, where most miners kept working through the strike, kept its pits a little longer than most, but not for long: its median pit closed in 1992, against 1989 in Yorkshire.
To turn pits into towns I used the ONS Built-up Areas of 2022, which cover every town and village in Great Britain. A pit belongs to a town if it lies within 3 km of the town's centre, or within 2 km of its edge for larger towns (I treat each town as a circle with the same area). Pits often stood just outside the village they fed, so the rule is generous. Then I sorted every town into four groups:
For the comparisons I keep to the 2,587 built-up areas in England and Wales with 2,000 to 100,000 people in 2021, because Census 2021 figures for Scotland are not in my data. Among them are 209 pit towns, home to 2,850,284 people, 360 coalfield neighbours, 80 older mining towns and 1,938 comparison towns.
In Yorkshire and the Humber, 26% of all the towns in this size range were pit towns; in the East Midlands 18%, in Wales 17% and in the North East 15%. Because the comparisons are made within each region, a Yorkshire pit town is always set against Yorkshire towns without a pit, not against the Home Counties.
For each town I took eight figures from Census 2021 and the ONS income estimates: the share of adults long-term sick or disabled; the share economically inactive for reasons other than retirement or study; the share in work; the shares in routine or semi-routine jobs and in managerial or professional jobs; the share of residents aged 65 or over; the share of households without a car or van; and mean household income (for the financial year ending 2023, available for 1,582 of the towns).
The raw medians are stark: 2.0 times the share of adults long-term sick, and £11,949 less median household income. Raw medians mix in size and region, so I compared each group with comparison towns of similar size in the same region, using a regression with region, size and size squared. The chart shows the gaps and their 95% intervals.
Size for size, and region for region, the pit towns have 2.0 percentage points more adults who are long-term sick or disabled (95% interval 1.7 to 2.3). Against a comparison town median of 2.9%, that is about 1.7 times as many. They have 3.2 points more adults out of work for reasons other than retirement or study, 6.5 points more in routine or semi-routine jobs, 8.0 points fewer in managerial or professional jobs, 3.7 points more households without a car, and about £5,900 a year less household income (10.7% of the comparison towns' median).
Forty years on, the pit towns are poorer and sicker than similar towns that never had a pit. The gap is not small, and it holds in England and in Wales alike.
Two results are less obvious. The pit towns are younger, with 3.7 points fewer residents aged 65 or over. And their share of adults in work is no different from the comparison towns (+0.2 points, well within chance). That is because fewer of their adults are retired: among those of working age, more are out of work through sickness or disability. Allowing for the share aged 65 or over leaves the sickness gap at 2.1 points.
The older mining towns, whose pits mostly closed long before 1984, show the same pattern at roughly half to two thirds the size: 0.9 points more long-term sick, 4.7 points more routine jobs and £3,403 less income. The coalfield neighbours sit closer again to the comparison towns (0.9 points more long-term sick, £1,581 less income). The nearer a town was to the 1984 pits, the bigger the gap.
If the closures themselves left the scar, you might expect towns whose pit shut in 1985 to look worse than towns whose pit worked on into the 2000s. I split the pit towns by the year their last pit closed: 59 in 1984 to 1987, 121 in 1988 to 1994 and 29 in 1995 to 2015.
There is no clear difference. Compared with towns of the same size and region whose last pit closed in 1984 to 1987, those whose pit lasted until 1995 or later have 0.4 points less long-term sickness, well within chance, and no clear difference in income either. Each extra decade the pit stayed open goes with a difference in sickness of 0.05 points, which is negligible. The towns that lost their pit in the 2010s look much like those that lost it in the 1980s.
I can think of two readings, and the data cannot choose between them. One is that the gap is about the coalfields as places, not about the date of a closure: the industrial structure, the health legacy of mining work, the kind of jobs that came after. The other is that by the time the late survivors closed they employed far fewer local men than in 1984, so their towns had already been through most of the change. Either way, the date on the closure notice is not what separates these towns now.
Association, not cause. The coalfields were not like other places before the closures. Mining towns were built for the pits, their work was manual, and mining itself left men with damaged lungs and backs. I have no town figures from 1981 or 1991 in my data, so I cannot compare before and after, and some of today's gap was surely there in 1984. The older mining towns, whose pits closed decades earlier and which show a similar but smaller gap, fit that view: the coalfields have a long shadow, and 1984 to 1994 is only its latest part.
Which towns count. My rule, a pit within 3 km of the centre or 2 km of the edge, is rough. With a tighter rule (2 km, or 1 km beyond the edge) 140 towns count as pit towns and the sickness gap is 2.2 points; with a looser one (5 km, or 3 km beyond the edge) 322 towns and 1.7 points. Keeping only towns of 5,000 or more gives 1.8 points, only towns at least 15 km from a city of 100,000 gives 2.2, and only the coalfield regions gives 2.0. In England alone the gap is 1.8 points and in Wales 2.7 points.
The comparison towns are not untouched. Many lost steelworks, mills or factories in the same years. My comparison asks how pit towns differ from other towns of their size and region, not from places that escaped deindustrialisation.
The pit list. The NMRS figures came to me as an extract of its online tables, which I checked against Wikipedia where I could; a few years may be out by one, and closure dates for merged mines are hard to pin down. 95 pits are placed at their village rather than the pit head, which can be a kilometre or two out.
Census 2021. The census was taken in March 2021, during the pandemic, which may have affected work and health answers everywhere. Income figures are modelled estimates for small areas, not counts. Scottish towns are mapped but not compared.
Pits. Every colliery in the Northern Mine Research Society's tables of National Coal Board collieries in England, Wales and Scotland that closed in 1984 or later, with Wikipedia's List of collieries in Yorkshire (1984 to 2015) for Yorkshire (58 rows) and its Derbyshire and United Kingdom lists as checks; Wikipedia's year is used where both give one. Each pit is placed at an OpenStreetMap feature whose name is the pit's name followed by Colliery, Pit, Mine or Drift within 12 km of its village (37), else at a Wikidata mine with a matching label (64), else at its village in OS Open Names (95).
Towns and outcomes. ONS Built-up Areas 2022 for Great Britain; Census 2021 tables TS001, TS007A, TS045, TS062 and TS066 summed from LSOAs by the ONS best-fit lookup; mean household income from the ONS small area estimates (FYE2023), population-weighted over best-fit MSOAs. Older collieries: OpenStreetMap features and Wikidata items named as collieries or coal pits more than 1.5 km from a 1984 pit.
Comparisons. Least-squares regressions of each outcome on the town group, log population and its square, and region, with robust standard errors; checks add the log distance to the nearest built-up area of 100,000 or more, the share aged 65 or over, tighter and looser town rules, and subsets. A nearest-neighbour match within region on population gives a sickness gap of 1.4 points and an income gap of £5,098. These are associations, not causes.