Industrial Heritage and Regional Identities

Christian Wicke, Stefan Berger, Jana Golombek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315281155
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Heritage is not what we see in front of us, it is what we make of it in our heads. Heritage sites have been connected to a range of identarian projects, both spatial and non-spatial. One of the most common links with heritage has been national identity. This book stresses that heritage has developed powerful links to regional and local identities. Contributors deal explicitly with regions of heavy industry in different parts of the world, exploring non-spatial forms of identity: including class, religious, ethnic, racial, gender and cultural identities.

In many heritage sites, non-spatial forms of identity are interlinked with spatial ones. Civil society action has been important in representations of regional identities and industrial-heritage campaigns. Region-branding seems to determine the ultimate success of industrial heritage, a process that is closely connected to the marketing of regions to provide a viable economic future and attract tourism to the region. Selected case-studies on coal and steel producing regions in this book provide the first global survey of how regions of heavy industry deal with their industrial heritage, and what it means for regional identity and region-branding.

This book draws a range of powerful conclusions about the path dependency of particular forms for post-industrial regional identity in former regions of heavy industry. It highlights both commonalities and differences in the strategies employed with regard to the regions' industrial heritage. This book will appeal to lecturers, students and scholars in the fields of heritage management, industrial studies and cultural geography

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1
Mining memories

Big Pit and industrial heritage in South Wales

Leighton S. James

Introduction

In 1935, Thomas Jones, the educationalist and founder of the journal Welsh Outlook, angered at the sense of hopelessness that infected South Wales during the economic depression, suggested satirically that the mining valleys should be evacuated and turned into an industrial museum.¹ Coal mining in South Wales survived the ‘devil’s decade’, but a brief flowering of the industry in the immediate post-war period masked long term economic decline. The region was hit by waves of pit closures in the 1960s and again in the 1980s and 1990s. In January 2008, the oldest continuously worked deep coal mine and the last in South Wales, Tower Colliery, shut its gates. This marked the end of an industry that had dominated South Wales for almost two centuries.

Today, mining in the region is restricted to small-scale private drift mines that are but a pale shadow of the industry which at its height employed over 270,000 men. Yet, although the industry is effectively dead, it is not forgotten. Attempts to capture some of South Wales’s industrial past through industrial heritage sites began in the 1970s with the establishment of the South Wales Miners’ Museum, but the best known and larger sites are Big Pit at Blaenavon (Figure 1.1) and the Rhondda Heritage Park. The former forms part of the Blaenavon World Heritage site, which was inscribed in 2000. Other industrial heritage sites relating to the South Wales’s coal mining past include Cefn Coed Colliery at Neath and the Waterfront Museum in Swansea. The open air Museum of Welsh Life at St. Fagans has also begun to incorporate more buildings relating to Wales’s industrial past, such as the Oakdale Workmen’s Hall. South Wales might not have been evacuated, but in some respects Thomas Jones’s suggestion that the mining valleys be turned into an industrial museum has been realized.

The relationship between heritage, history and class identity has, since the 1980s, promoted significant debate between historians, cultural commentators and those involved in the heritage industry. For some commentators, such as Patrick Wright, heritage served as an essentially conservative political project that appealed to national identities as a cover for deindustrialization.² Similarly, Robert Hewison decried the heritage industry in Great Britain for foisting a nostalgic and superficial cultural economy on communities and for contributing to a ‘climate of decline’. Hewison shared Wright’s criticism, but he also addressed industrial heritage specifically. He criticized it as more often the result of economic weakness and questioned the accuracy of the past presented. In the context of South Wales, he pointed to the irony of the closure of the Lewis Merthyr pit and plans to offer on the same site “a total mining experience, [where] ex-miners will re-enact their redun”.³ In fact, fears that industrial archaeology would turn South Wales into “a nation of museum attendants minding the world’s biggest mausoleum” had been voiced at the start of the 1980s.⁴ J. Geraint Jenkins, historian and former curator of the Welsh Folk Museum, echoed these concerns by emphasizing the denatured situation of some preserved industrial buildings. The complexes they had once been part of had been bulldozed, leaving them standing incongruously on otherwise bare plots of land. Similarly, he questioned what visitors could learn from the sanitized nature of the Big Pit museum, writing,

because they [the visitor] can walk comfortably upright along well-lit corridors the reality of coal mining can hardly be presented to them.… If the visitor relies on impressions of the coal industry gathered from a visit to Big Pit, then he or she will hardly understand why coal miners throughout history fought employer and government over the wretched conditions of work in the mines.⁵

Figure 1.1 Wales Big Pit Blaneavon

Such critiques appear to afford little hope for heritage to maintain and transmit working-class identity in a post-industrial age. In the 1990s, however, Raphael Samuel challenged the idea that heritage is essentially reactionary and offered a more positive vision of its role.⁶ He regarded it as a popular rather than hierarchical, top-down process and argued that it was symptomatic of a breaking down of class divides. He praised industrial heritage for “enlarging the notion of historic monument” and recognizing that the process of deindustrialization in the 1960s and 1970s was as momentous as the Industrial Revolution.⁷ Samuel’s support for heritage was a reaction to the criticism it had received at the hands of Wright and Hewison in the 1980s, but he also regarded it as a way of forwarding a Socialist or anti-Thatcherite political agenda of community cohesion in the face of privatization and economic liberalism.

Laurajane Smith has charted a route between Hewison’s pessimism and Samuel’s optimism. While broadly welcoming the heritage movement, she has pointed to the potential problems in the creation of authorized heritage discourses (AHD) imposed by state agencies on industrial communities. She has highlighted the contested nature of heritage as different groups and actors negotiate the creation of heritage narratives. She points to the importance of individuals and communities exercising control in the heritage process, “because of the political and cultural power of ‘heritage’ to represent and validate a sense of place, memory and identity”.⁸

This chapter argues that this contestation of heritage has been evident on several levels in Wales. First, there were the tensions between Welsh national identity and that of the South Wales coalfield. Early heritage initiatives in Wales were tied to expressions of Welsh national identity often rooted in the Welsh language. During much of the 20th century, however, this sat awkwardly with a more specific, regional working-class identity in a South Wales coalfield decisively shaped by the experience of industrialization and its attendant social and political changes. Early heritage produced an AHD that essentially excluded the industrialized, Anglicized and, by the inter-war years, Labour voting, South Wales coalfield in favor of an idealized rural, Liberal, Welsh-speaking past. Second, when industrial heritage did emerge in South Wales in the wake of the decline of the mining industry it was subject to the tensions identified by Smith between local communities’ desires to conserve and commemorate and state agencies emphasis on economic revitalization and attempts to impose an AHD. Some heritage sites, such as the Rhondda Heritage Park, seemed to conform to Samuel’s depiction of heritage as a bottom-up movement aimed at maintaining community cohesion, but were later co-opted by state agencies, which saw them as a means of economic regeneration.⁹

The chapter uses the example of Big Pit, South Wales’s premier industrial heritage site, to challenge Samuel’s idea of heritage as necessarily about community action, whilst at the same time demonstrating that attempts to impose an AHD are complicated by the role of the guides who are able to draw on their own experiences as working miners and of the decline of the industry. It will argue on the basis of tourist surveys, interviews with staff members at Big Pit and visitor questionnaires that there continues to be a complex relationship between representation of industrial South Wales and broader Welsh national identity. Although the two share commonalities, the primary sources point to continued tensions between the different visions of Wales outlined above. Finally, industrial heritage has an ambiguous relationship with working-class identity in a post-industrial setting, but it nevertheless plays a crucial role in transmitting a sense of South Wales’s industrial history to a wider audience.¹⁰

The industrialization of South Wales

The coal industry decisively changed the character of the South Wales valleys and the adjoining coastal plain. Although coal mining in Wales dates back to the Roman period, the rapid expansion of industry began only in the late 18th century. Early coal production in the region initially served the iron and steel works, which themselves developed to serve demand created by Britain’s wars with France in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Peace post-1815 witnessed an economic slump, but the industry was given a further boost by the expansion of the rail network and the transition from sail to steam locomotion in shipping. The latter was particularly important for the coal industry in South Wales. Although the western edge of the coalfield produced anthracite, which was largely destined for domestic production, much of the coal produced in the eastern and central valleys was particularly suited for the production of steam. Welsh ‘steam’ coal supplied the growing merchant navy and its coaling stations worldwide. By the end of the 19th century, it had also become the preferred supplier to the Royal Navy. Consequently, steam coal became a commodity in its own right and the development of sale coal for steam production in the last half of the 19th century saw coal mining surpass the early metal industries to achieve its hegemonic position in South Wales.

The expansion of the coal industry transformed the South Wales valley from a predominantly rural and agriculture region into one of the most important industrial centers in Britain. As a labor-intensive industry the coal companies required an influx of migrants to meet its demand for labor. Early waves of migrants were initially drawn from the surrounding Welsh counties, a process which Brinley Thomas has suggested initially strengthened the Welsh language and culture.¹¹ This immediately available pool of labor had been largely exhausted by the last quarter of the 19th century and thereafter the labor force, particularly in the eastern valleys, was drawn increasingly from the English counties bordering Wales. In the first decade of the 20th century, migration into South Wales was second only to that into the United States of America. Brinley Thomas’s thesis has been challenged for underplaying the impact on industrialization on rural Welsh communities. Research has also suggested that linguistic shifts were complex.¹² Nevertheless, the growing complexity in the social composition of the population of the industrial Valleys and decline of the Welsh language were to have important repercussions for early heritage initiatives.

This rapid population growth resulted in parallel rapid urbanization of the valleys. The topography fostered the development of a distinctive pattern of urban settlement. Narrow ribbon-shaped streets with rows of terraced housing climbed the valley sides, whilst the pit and railway networks occupied the valley floor.¹³ The Church of Wales failed to keep up with this rapid urbanization, and various Nonconformist denominations filled the religious and cultural vacuum. The less hierarchical structure of Nonconformity encouraged the active involvement of the population and the chapels became important social as well as religious spaces within the mining communities. The chapels, their choirs and their local eisteddfodau (cultural festivals composed of music and poetry recitals celebrating the Welsh language) formed a crucial part of the initial strengthening of Welsh identity in the early to mid-19th century. Nonconformity continued to play a significant role in the cultural and community life of the South Wales valleys well into the 20th centuries. However, as a sign of the increasing Anglicization of the eastern and central mining valleys, by the late 19th century and early 20th century many chapels had switched to the use of the English language. They, along...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: industrial heritage and regional identities
• 1 Mining memories: Big Pit and industrial heritage in South Wales
• 2 Looking back: representations of the industrial past in Asturias
• 3 Regional identity and industrial heritage in the mining area of Nord-Pas-de-Calais
• 4 A post-industrial mindscape? The mainstreaming and touristification of industrial heritage in the Ruhr
• 5 Contested heritage and regional identity in the Borsod Industrial Area in Hungary
• 6 Identity and mining heritage in Romania’s Jiu Valley coal region: commodification, alienation, renaissance
• 7 Regional identity in the making? Industrial heritage and regional identity in the coal region of Northern Kyūshū in Japan
• 8 “There needs to be something there for people to remember”: industrial heritage in Newcastle and the Hunter Valley, Australia
• 9 From mills to malls: industrial heritage and regional identity in metropolitan Pittsburgh
• 10 Regions of heavy industry and their heritage – between identity politics and ‘touristification’: where to next?
• Index