Easington: a small, tight-knit community that stagnated after the closure of County Durham’s last pit in 1993. It’s a riches-to-rags tale familiar to anyone who lives in a former mining town — the state-mandated violence, police brutality, and community spirit seen there were no different than in any other pit village across the country. Yet as we mark forty years since the events of 1984 and ’85, something about this particular colliery utterly encapsulates the political intent, local response, and lasting legacy of this period in the UK’s national history.

Situated less than two miles from the beach, Easington was one of several large pits that had been mechanized in the late 1960s. As smaller mines across County Durham were closed, workers flocked to Dawdon, Easington, Horden, and Blackhall and retrained to keep up with the rapidly developing industry. The result? A community of highly skilled workers who knew when to move with the times and when to get organized.

“I used to work at one of those catalog companies in Sunderland,” recalls Heather Wood, an activist and former Labour councilor from Easington Colliery. “That’s when I had my first clash with management. I wanted to go out on a weekend, but our bosses were making us work seven days a week. So I went down to the warehouse where there was a union, got advice from them, and called everyone at lunchtime. I was about eighteen then. We won the right to say we didn’t want to work overtime, we didn’t want to work weekends. That just spurred me on.”

By 1984, she was chair of the Easington constituency Labour Party. While never an official member of Women Against Pit Closures, her experience and strong socialist values helped her get women (and men) from across East Durham organized. A group called Save Easington Area Mines formed, and Heather became chair.

“We invited shopkeepers — anybody of any political persuasion that was interested in or concerned about the way things were going for our community,” she continues. “Before long, I had women calling me up from around Durham, asking me to come to union meetings with them or help them get organized. Most women throughout Durham, at some point, were on a picket line.”

As the community pulled together on strike, the area soon became known for its militancy. Pickets from East Durham and beyond were successful in blocking one man’s repeated attempts to cross the line in Easington — a spectacle soon sensationalized by the right-wing press. “It took 1000 pickets to stop 28-year-old rebel miner Paul Wilkinson from getting to work at Easington Colliery,” cried the Daily Mail on August 21. According to Heather, this heightened media coverage signaled the start of something far more sinister.

“Things were relatively calm, until the Conservative MP Piers Merchant went on the television — I think it was Tyne Tees — and said, ‘Why is it that Durham constabulary can’t get one man into Easington pit?’ The next day, I was taking my kids to school. As we were passing the village green in the car, my youngest son said: ‘Look, mam, the green is black’ — and it was. It was all police, and it was black.”

By the end of August, the coast was under siege. Easington was flooded by police from across the country, who formed tight barricades and questioned anyone who tried to move in or out of the area. Their menacing presence would be immortalized in Keith Pattison’s 1984 photo series, which documents a community fighting to maintain the comforts of family life around the grim reality of constant state surveillance. Pattison’s images are so striking, so iconic, that it is easy to understand why — even for those who have never stepped foot in the village — visions of Easington are conjured in our collective conscience when we think of the strike.

In his memoir Dragged Up Proppa, local author Pip Fallow describes the eerily disengaged attitude of the police stationed in his local village of Blackhall, just a few miles down the road.

If I tried to fire up a conversation with a copper on a street corner, they would, like the Queen’s Guard, stare straight ahead and refuse to look me in the eye. They’d obviously been told we were an underclass who could not be trusted as we had the black of dirty coal running through our veins.

Arrests and beatings were also common. “One woman from South Hetton was arrested for throwing eggs. My dad was standing on the corner one day — they told him to move or he would be arrested. He was a retired miner suffering from emphysema!” explains Heather. “We were starting to get threatened by the police, and we were no longer allowed to shout ‘scab.’ So we got creative — I would get one group of women to stand on one side of the road shouting ‘sc’ and another on the other side shouting ‘ab.’ They couldn’t arrest us for that!” she laughs.

“Still, the things they said to us, the things we saw . . . it was horrendous. The police used to link their arms outside the pit gates, then all of a sudden, two of them would unlink, and they’d pull somebody in. One day, I remember a lad being pulled in — they took him behind the pit wall and you could hear him being hit. His mother was standing right on the other side. Imagine that.”

With locals barred from moving freely, standing on the street, or even visiting their local allotments, tensions began to rise. “About halfway through the strike, people in Easington were starting to get irritated and take it out on each other,” says Heather. “I remember being in a meeting and telling them, go home, write down how you feel. You can come back and say whatever you want in the meetings, but as soon as you go through that door, we have to be united.”

The community continued to struggle under intolerable circumstances until, by the spring of 1985, it was clear that the tide had turned. The men of Easington returned to work on March 5. “We had our pride and stood tall,” says Heather, “but we knew it was the death knell for our pits.”

Today the villages that once banded together along the coast bear some of the deepest scars of the miners’ defeat. As Patrick Hollis wrote for Tribune back in 2019, “When the colliery closed [in 1993], it took with it much of the sense of connection the people of the village had with each other. Easington has been hit harder than a lot of other villages, and the economic prosperity it enjoyed before the strike has largely failed to return.” This sense of social disconnect in East Durham coastal communities was explored as recently as 2023 by Ken Loach, who, like Pattison, captured a snapshot (albeit fictionalized) of sociopolitical unrest in Easington with his film The Old Oak.

Nevertheless, there is some hope that community and prosperity can be rekindled across East Durham. After releasing his award-winning novel last March, Pip Fallow decided to harness his influence to rally those who have been left behind with the Proppa Jobs campaign. Following a recent sold-out lecture at Durham’s Gala Theatre, it’s clear that his ideas are gaining traction.

“It’s about reindustrializing the area,” he explains. “I always ask people, ‘What did you see when you looked out the window when you were a kid?’ I looked and saw the street full of men walking one way to the pit with clean faces, and a stream of men going the other way with black faces. I saw bus stops full of people going to the steelworks and the shipyards. We’ve got the perfect industrial footprint. The railway infrastructure and the roads were all built to get coal out and export it. We’ve got research and development labs at the university. Nobody’s joined the dots, and that’s what we’re out to do.”

Fallow points out that it’s taken forty years of deindustrialization and neglect to reach the current state of deprivation, and it could take another forty years to put it right: “A couple of generations. But I don’t think that is a reason not to do it,” he concludes. “I think it’s our duty to lay the foundation.”