Abstract
This article challenges popular representations of post-war British coal mining communities. Such localities are often imagined as displaying cultural practices belonging to a previous age that were subsequently fragmented by the economic and social changes of the 1980s. Such images and tropes have been further reinforced by the somewhat heroic construction of miners as archetypal proletarians in the strike of 1984-85, and through films such as Brassed Off (1996), Billy Elliot (2000) and Pride (2014). Through a focus on cultural activities in miners' welfare clubs, geographical mobility and holidays/vacations, youth subcultures and music creation and consumption at a number of different colliery sites, it is argued that as well as being bearers of a mythologised industrial past, mining communities were also symbolic of affluence and modernity in the changing cultural landscape of Britain from the 1950s through to the 1990s. The research draws substantially on material from the archives of the National Coal Board (NCB) and National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and an oral history project that conducted interviews with 96 former miners. It complements recent interventions on the history of mining communities that have sought to unpick the complexities of the rise and fall of British coal.