Memory, Heritage and Loss in Former Coal Mining Communities of the Durham Coalfield

Abstract

This research investigates how post-industrial communities invoke collective memories and emotional attachments to a shared industrial past to foster contemporary communal identities and belonging. The field site is the former Durham Coalfield, whose economic base and social fabric were ruptured by the mining industry's decline. Drawing on theories of collective memory, heritage, identity and belonging, I take a social constructivist approach to analyse how locals leverage democratised forms of industrial heritage – narratives, places, objects, and rituals curated ‘from below’ – to make sense of destabilising losses to the social order. Centring affective and experiential engagements with the remains of the industrial era, the study reveals industrial heritage as a conduit for the reconstitution of communal bonds within the rubble of rupture. Findings elucidate how strategic deployment of industrial heritage enables the invocation of continuity with the romanticised industrial past to sustain collective identities despite upheaval. I contribute textured ethnographic insights and conceptual development regarding the vital emotional afterlives of industries within processes of meaning-making and communal resilience in post-industrial places.