Britain’s mining industry occupies a special place in the hearts and minds of many, especially on the Left. The strikes of the 1970s and 1980s have achieved totemic status, representing the entwined phenomena of deindustrialization and the defeat of the organized labor movement. When many think of this history, they’ll envisage flat-capped miners from the North, the Midlands, or Wales out on the picket lines facing down the police. Less well-known is mining history of the leafy, southeastern county of Kent.

Villages such as Aylesham, Snowdown, Tilmanstone, and Elvington are almost picture-perfect stereotypes of conservative countryside Britain: they all fall in Tory-held constituencies, are relatively small settlements with nice houses, surrounded by fields, farms, and occasional bits of forest. While the colliery buildings may be dilapidated, overgrown, demolished, or repurposed, many who still live in these villages have had their lives shaped by the mining industry.

With the defeat of the 1984–85 strike and the dismantling of the industry, these communities, too, have been scarred by the destruction of class solidarity. Yet they still bear signs of the solidarity of decades past — and give some sense of how it could be rebuilt in the future.