First preliminary draft in use 28.08.00

The following is a draft for comment being prepared by the coal mining history section of the International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage (TICCIH).  The co-ordinators of this study are Stephen Hughes, Head of Survey, Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales and Professor Dr. Raina Slotta , Director of the German Mining Museum, Bochum.  It will be revised in the light of comments: the list will not be prescriptive and have recommendations but only examples of mining complexes that the World Heritage Committee might consider as worthy of inscription as a World Heritage site.  To balance the perceived European bias of the list it may be important to include at least one North American site of the late 19th/ early twentieth century site and one twentieth century complex from Japan or China.  To minimise any perception of British/German bias within Europe it may be advisable to omit the existing Ironbridge complex from mention and to add Bois du Luc or another European site, possible one of the better East European complexes. 

TICCIH – International Colliery Monuments List._

1. Preface

1.1   This list is being prepared under the auspices of TICCIH (The

International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial

Heritage) as one of a series of industry by industry lists for

use by ICOMOS in providing the World Heritage Committee with an

list of 'colliery' sites recommended as being of international

significance.  This is not a sum of proposals from each

individual country, neither does it make any formal submissions

for World Heritage Site status.  It merely attempts to help

inform World Heritage Committee decisions by trying to arrive at

a consensus of 'expert' opinion on what significant sites,

monuments and landscapes there

might be.  This is part of the Global Study of types of

international monuments that might at present be considered to be

under-represented on the World Heritage List.

2. Introduction

2.1  Internationally significant collieries might be considered for

World Heritage Status by conforming to one of three monument

types:

2.1.1. Individually or groups of significant structures or monuments on colliery sites and adjoining colliery settlements;

2.1.2. Integrated industrial areas; either manufacturing or

extractive which contain collieries as an essential part of the

industrial landscape;

2.1.3. Large colliery complexes, some with associated by-product processing and colliery housing.

3.  Definition[i]

3.1.  A colliery is a human-engineered mine for the extraction of coal.  It may be of outstanding universal value from the point of view of history or technology, either intrinsically or as an exceptional example representative of this category of cultural property.  It may be a monumental, or an integral component of a complex cultural landscape.

4.  Areas and Values of Significance in the Colliery Heritage[ii]

4.1. TECHNOLOGY

4.1.1   The following are the areas of technology which may be of

significance:

4.1.2.  The engineering structures of the colliery with reference to

comparative structural features in other areas of architecture

and technology;

4.1.3.  The development of the sophistication of constructional

methods;

4.1.4.  The transfer of technologies.

4.2. ECONOMY

4.2.1  The production of coal as a basic fuel has been fundamental to global economic development.  Collieries are of continuing economic use despite the growing importance of alternative fuels such as oil, gas, nuclear power and solar, wind and water power.  The following factors are important.

4.2.2  Nation building;

4.2.3  Industrial development;

4.2.4  Generation of Wealth;

4.2.5  Development of engineering skills applied to other areas and

          industries.

4.3. SOCIAL FACTORS

4.3.1  The building of collieries had social consequences:

4.3.2  The redistribution of wealth with social and cultural

          results;

4.3.3     The movement of people and the interaction of cultural

          groups.

4.4. LANDSCAPES

4.4.1.    Such large-scale works had an impact on the natural

landscape.  There was also the generation of new industrial

settlement patterns from rural dispersed populations to the

creation of urban nucleii.

NOTE: There are potentially some additional areas of significance

associated with classifications of historic towns and natural

criteria.

5.  Technology Transfer or Indigenous Development

5.1  The idea of a structure having an international, or indeed global, influence is obviously central to it being viewed as of relevance to the heritage of a large part of mankind.  However, initially and before the end of the eighteenth century such a process of diffusion of knowledge is difficult to document: a single very large coal industry being confined to one country in that period (The United Kingdom) and many fundamental innovations in the industry were made there.  Archaeological excavation has now revealed the existence of developed mines with galleries in fifteenth-century England but how widespread such features were internationally in this period is unknown.[iii]  By the end of the eighteenth-century British collieries often had many miles of underground galleries.

5.2   Large-scale water-powered non-ferrous mining technology with long watercourses and reversible waterwheels was developed by German-speaking miners in central Europe by the sixteenth-century and widely publicised internationally by the publication of Gregorius Agricola’s De Re Metallica.[iv]  The precise metamorphosis of the examples of the machinery illustrated there into the numerous ‘coalmills’ found on the seventeenth-century Great Northern Coalfield of (north-east) England or in the many eighteenth-century waterwheels used in other British coalfields is impossible to establish.  The lighter duty of winding on the extensive central European non-ferrous mines was carried-out by elaborate horse-powered winding apparatus with roofed circular horse-walks.  Edward I of England had imported German mining expertise to Wales in the thirteenth century and from Tudor times German-speaking miners were brought-in in large numbers to many non-ferrous mines.  There must have been some transfer of skills into the rather different practices of coalmining in Britain but these are difficult to quantify.  Rather interestingly horse-engine (‘horse-gin’) construction in Britain was generally less elaborate than in Germany and the machinery and their human and animal operatives were not given the shelter of a roof.  This emphasis on the functionality of British practice without elaboration of architecture, also later used in North American practice, seems to be a key difference with German mining cultural practice right into the twentieth century.

5.2  New steam-powered water-pumping technology was evolved at the end of the seventeenth century and in the early eighteenth century to be followed by steam-powered winding technology at the end of the eighteenth century.  Pumping-engines were integral with their large masonry housing, and pivoted on a thick wall, but others of the growing number of elements in a colliery could be executed in much more temporary materials.  Colliery surface layouts up to the mid nineteenth century in Britain, even on the biggest mines of the Great Northern Coalfield, were dominated by simply-designed tall masonry beam-engine houses with elevated winding-gear on spindly timber supports leading to irregularly profiled timber-clad shaftheads.  The layouts were completed by timber-framed and clad screens buildings elevated over colliery railways and stone ventilation chimneys capped by timber wind-veins.[v]  Smaller stone-built sheds huddled around these might include boiler houses, offices, workshops and often in larger collieries; coking ovens.[vi]  Once again the prime design motive was effective production enhancement in any one period and not aesthetic considerations.  In the later nineteenth-century many individual colliery buildings and some colliery layouts were given a more permanent form in both in Britain and on mainland Europe.  In Britain, and in the United States of America, this still often meant the simple and functional ‘industrial vernacular style’ with round-headed windows and rock-faced masonry in stone building areas.  In continental Europe a long cultural tradition of the ornamentation of large buildings that transferred to the industrial sector was much in evidence in elaborate buildings and layouts using classic and gothic revival styles.

5.3   The most striking example of a great expansion in elaborate colliery architecture was in the sinking of the many deep coalmines between c.1855 and c.1880 in the Ruhrgebiet area of Germany which led to it becoming Europe’s largest and most intensively developed industrial. area.  The pulley-wheels (sheaves) over the shaft were not supported by timber or iron headframes but by high brickwork Malakoff Towers which lent themselves to the elaboration more than their flimsier predecessors and whose high costs of construction were met by banking capital from the wealthy bankers of Cologne.[vii]  The Malakoff Tower became associated with the innovative Koepe winding system which was developed by the Krupp Company in the surviving Malakoff Tower at the Hannover Pit in Bochum.  This used continuous winding-cables held by narrow pulleys positioned at the top of the tower and foot of the shaft and dispensed with the wide twin-cable drums that had characterised earlier practice.  The use both of Malakoff Towers and of Koepe Winding spread widely in mainland Europe.

5.4  In some of the British coalfields, such as the south Wales coalfield (then serving the needs of the largest copper and iron-smelting works in the world), there was a separate and earlier development of masonry shafthead towers but these were smaller and constructed of unadorned rubble masonry.[viii]   Later nineteenth-century stone and brick shafthead towers were built at No. 3 shaft at Seaham Colliery (Great Northern Coalfield) and at the Winstanley Shaft (extant) at Chatterley Whitfield Colliery in Midlands England.  Both were exceptionally plain but the latter is seen as being of ‘German type’ but is much plainer and has obliquely sloping side-buttresses of a type not seen on the much more elaborate Malakoff Towers in Germany.  The Koepe winding with narrow friction pulleys was hardly used in Britain before nationalisation in 1947 when it was widely adopted: the surviving Koepe Winder of 1923, set on top of a plain tapering concrete tower, at the former Murton Colliery, was only the second built in the Great Northern Coalfield.[ix] 

5.5  Colliery surface layouts had originally been given substantial permanence by the need to give steam-engines considerable holding structures.  In the nineteenth-century there was a growth in the number of ancillary structures but it was the switch from steam to electrical technology that provided a spur for the reorganisation and regularisation of new colliery planning.  In Britain most large collieries had been established for a very long time and were being continually modernised and altered as the need arose.  By 1900 the dominant area in the growth of the coal industry in Europe was the Ruhr and it was here that a new concept in the surface planning of a mine was evolved.   

5.6  Construction of the colliery yard of Zollern 2-4 at Dortmund began between 1900-1902 using a regular layout on a new site and employing revivalist historical architecture.  By 1902 it had been decided to build the first common engine-hall, or machine-house, into which all the winders, generators, compressors and winders were inserted by completion of the housing in 1904 (its 1904 electric winder is the oldest in the world).[x]  It was also one of the first colliery buildings to be elaborately ornamented in a new style of architecture (in this case Art Nouveau) rather than being finished in decoration derived from classical of gothic revival sources.  Its design concepts seem to have been influential internationally almost immediately.

5.7    At this time there was a great boom in the south Wales coalfield, prompted by the great increase in demand for coal for steamships, that made the coalfield Britain’s largest in 1913: the year of maximum production for British coal.  The coalfield also became the largest coal-exporting area in the world.  Completely new colliery layouts were being laid-out to meet this boom. Only two years after the completion of the engine-hall at Dortmund one was being built by the colliery engineer and architect George Hann at Penallta (1906-09) in south Wales.[xi]  Hann may have been of German extraction. However, one difference between the two sites was that Hann considered the relative merits of steam and electrical power and decided to adopt the former: the very long Penallta engine-hall included steam-engines, winders, compressors and a ventilating-fan.  In 1910-14 the new Britannia Colliery nearby was given a similar engine-hall and was all electric with much of the electricity generated by waste gases from the engines at Penallta.  Other engine-halls of the same type followed in quick succession in this fast-expanding coalfield.  Most are in very utilitarian style in local rubble-stone with some classical revival detailing.    

5.8     The same steam-coal boom in Wales produced a noteworthy attempt at systematic colliery planning with a colliery grouped on two hillside terraces with matching twin engine-houses flanking twin headframes and culminating in a tall central chimney.  This Crumlin Navigation Colliery (1907-11) now unfortunately lacks its headframes but retains buildings designed in a basic classical style executed in rich polychrome brickwork.  The design concept of a colliery vista terminated by a tall chimney was one taken-up in the design of the Zollverein 12 shafthead at Essen in the Ruhr.

5.9  Zollverein 12 (1928-32) is remarkable for the quality of its buildings designed in strictly modern functional style set amongst lawns and set-out on a grid with two axes culminating in a giant A-frame headframe straddling a shafthead tower with the second axis culminating in the boilerhouse tower with its central chimney.  Functionally it was designed to rationalise the infrastructure of the existing Zollverein Colliery which already had eleven dispersed shafts and to concentrate coal winding at this new central installation.  The colliery was built as Germany became the largest coal producer in Europe and was greatly influential in terms of design and operation.

5.10  The influence of Zollverein 12 is clear in the large mining complex at Faulquemont (near St. Avold) in France which was constructed in a similar modernist style between 1933 and 1935.  Neat square blocks set amongst lawns flanked a central avenue aligned on the power house chimney (the complex has mostly been demolished).  Somewhat diluted version of the symmetrically planned mine but spaced out and lacking visual foci were built in England at about the same time at Coventry and Houghton Main Collieries.[xii]  Nationalisation in Britain later freed-up resources for combined mine rationalisation projects such as Zollverein.  One of the first built in Britain (1948-53) was Maerdy (Mardy) Colliery in the Rhondda Valleys in south Wales which was laid-out in closely grouped functional blocks on a grid-plan but lacked the visual focus planned at Zollverein.  Rather similar were the new mines of the 1950s built on the south Wales anthracite coalfield at Abernant and Cynheidre.

5.11   What is more difficult to establish is any connection in planning through to the American coal industry which was the world’s largest by 1900.  German and other European miners did emigrate there but the nearest European precedent to the giant anthracite breakers of north-eastern Pennsylvania are probably non-ferrous mine processing floors.

5.12  Some aspects of the design of colliers’ housing can also be seen to have an international spread.  The ‘cluster house’ was a group of four houses set in each corner of a single block, of approximately square plan and set in a spacious garden.  Such houses were usually provided for supervisory or skilled workers within a textile factory.  The type originated in the England of the 1790s with surviving examples in the Derwent Valley of Derbyshire at Belper and Darley Abbey.  It was later used in the Cité Ouvrière in Mulhouse in the 1850s and from there spread to the Ruhrgebiet.  Examples can be seen in the housing estates surrounding the Zollverein Colliery.[xiii]

6.  The Evaluation System to be used for this TICCIH study

6.1.  The first time a new technology is applied to civil-engineering, mechanical-engineering or architecture is of particular significance to the history of mankind: depending on how wide and useful that particular innovation is.  Collieries have historically been very important as the means of providing a basic fuel, allowing the evolution of developed societies with a high degree of economic and commercial interchange.  The application of existing, or new, technologies to the evolution in sophistication of collieries infrastructure is particularly significant in that process.  As is the process of technology transfer between countries and continents: particularly in ways that this has significantly progressed the economic well-being of mankind and facilitated the development of sophisticated societies.  Such arguments can be applied either to individual colliery structures; whole collieries; or to integrated industrial areas such as the mining fields of metalliferous works.  However, the present condition of sites, structures and buildings are obvious weighting factors in assessing the significance of such types of structures.  It may well be that the present condition of the most significant sites as built do not warrant their designation as sites of world importance where sites elsewhere represent an important stage in the evolution of world collieries to a greater extent.

6.2.   Like many other types of industrial archaeological feature,

collieries are important because of their functional use.  However this functional use itself will mean that parts of a mechanism or infrastructure have to be maintained, modified, or

renewed in order to maintain the primary function of an operational colliery.  That this concept of renewal will not resultin an automatic rejection of a site as being of world importance has already been accepted by the World Heritage Committee at

their meeting in Nara, Japan.  It was also recognised in the 1994 and 1996 International Canal Heritage Documents that an element of the heritage of an industrial monument is its evolution over the course of time. 

7.  Evaluation criteria for this TICCIH study (to be finalised only after further international consultation)

The  following criteria are slightly adapted from criteria I-iv in paragraph 24 of the Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention, WHC/2/Revised January 1996: UNESCO.

7.2.  A unique achievement; a masterpiece of the creative genius;

7.3.  To have exerted great influence on developments of technological importance;

7.4.  An outstanding example of a type of a type of structure or

feature which illustrates a significant stage of history;

7.5  Directly associated with economic or social developments of

outstanding universal significance. 

7.6.  For the purposes of this TICCIH study authenticity is not

accepted as being of outstanding significance in a type of

functional structure or feature whose prime purpose was to meet

an economic purpose facilitated by constant maintenance and

partial renewal.  The International Canal Experts Meeting held in

Canada in September 1994 concluded that the technological changes

An industrial monument has undergone may in themselves constitute an element in the heritage of that monument or landscape.

7.7.  The level of existing legal protection and management

mechanisms is not considered of great importance in this advisory

study as states parties can introduce such mechanisms prior to

any formal intended application for World Heritage status.

8.  Units of Measurement

8.1.  In the final list most measurements will be in the metric system with some significant imperial measurements and distances given in parentheses.

One foot = 0.305 metres;              One mile = 1.61 kilometres; 

One metre = 3.28 feet;                One kilometre = 0.62 miles.

9.  Abbreviations

m  = metres; 

km = kilometres;

ft = feet.

10.  General Introduction to Coal-Mining History

10.1   Coal was worked in the Roman period but to what extent is a matter for further study.  Many major European coalfields were in small-scale use again by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  Until the mid sixteenth-century most manufacturing processes still used charcoal as a fuel and the demand for coal working remained on a modest scale.

10.2   By 1700 the world’s first Industrial Revolution was gaining momentum in Great Britain, using coal as a basic fuel.  Coal production there may have been the largest globally by 1550 when 200,000 tonnes were produced annually and this rose to about 3 million tonnes by 1700.[xiv] As the effects of the Industrial Revolution spread to the European continental homeland between 1785 and 1850 there was a great expansion in the coalfields of Saint-Etienne (France); Silesia (Prussia: now Poland); Wallonia (Belgium) and the Saarland and Ruhrgebiet (both in Germany).  Despite this spread Britain remained the international centre of coalmining until c.1900: by 1850 Britain was producing over 50 million tonnes annually, the USA 8 million, Germany 6 million and France 5 million.

10.3    In 1900 93% of total global energy consumption was supplied by coal and international production had reached some 740 million tonnes.  By the early twentieth century there was a fundamental re-adjustment in comparative national and regional outputs.  From 1900 the United States of America overtook Britain consistently as the world’s largest producer of coal so that by 1912 it was producing some 485 million tonnes of coal annually: almost twice the production of Britain which was producing some 264 million tonnes.  Germany was catching-up with British output and producing 172 million tonnes annually while France was fourth with 39 million tonnes: not far behind her were Russia with 26 million tonnes and Belgium with 26 million tonnes.  Asia was beginning to emerge as a significant producer in the twentieth century with Japan producing 17 million tonnes of coal in 1912.  

10.4   In terms of the global influence of  coal-trade Britain remained the key player in the early twentieth century: exporting by sea no less than 68 million tonnes of coal compared to the much lesser total of 28 million tonnes of sea-borne coal produced by the rest of the world.  The balance of production between coalfields in Britain was also changing: the Great Northern Coalfield of the north-east of England had been the largest in Britain from before 1700 until 1912, sustained by the great demand for sea-borne coal from the empire metropolis of London.  However, by 1913 British coal production peaked and the vast demand for coal from the hugely increasing steamship fleets of the world and the rapidly industrialising Mediterranean area resulted in south Wales becoming the largest coalfield in Britain between 1913 and 1926 and the world’s largest coal-exporting coalfield.

10.5  The World Energy Conference survey of energy resources (1974) showed that in the pre-1925 period three nations: the United States of America, Germany  and the United Kingdom accounted for the 80% of all coal and lignite (soft brown coal) mined up to that date.[xv]  In that year those three accounted for 76% of world production and were the only countries producing over 100 million tonnes of coal a year.  An additional 14 countries, half outside Europe, were producing more than ten million tonnes a year.

10.6  By the later twentieth century the situation had changed completely.  By 1971 an additional four countries were producing over 100 million tonnes of coal a year.  In 1976 the Soviet Union was the largest producer in the world, producing over 630 million tonnes annually, China had an output of 415 million tonnes, Poland 185 million tonnes and Czechoslovakia 113 million tonnes. 

10.7  In the last quarter of the twentieth century Australia, South Africa and India have become major producers.

10.8   In simplistic terms representative sites and landscapes of the most important international coalmining industries might be expected to be found in Britain between 1700 and the early twentieth century and in the USA, Germany and Russia within the first half of the twentieth century.   However, the survival of coal monuments and landscapes of international importance is obviously partly dependent on the vagaries of survival and re-use.  

11.  STUDY STRUCTURE.

11.1  Criteria and form to be based on the three Industrial Archaeological Occasional Papers/Studies for the World Heritage Convention already undertaken and issued as monographs in 1996-98.  There are some differences between these three studies.  Both the studies on Canals and on Bridges gave categorised lists of internationally significant examples.  The International Canal monuments List also included a marking system for significance.  The most recent study of this type entitled Railways as World Heritage Sites simply included a list of eight ‘Railways of Note’ with a proposed criteria of selection applied to each example. 

11.2.  Report to be posted on the internet for comment.

12.  Timetable.

12.1.  Co-ordinators based RCAHMW & Deutsches Bergbau Museum Bochum.  The first project liaison meeting was held at Bochum on Monday 6 September 1999.

12.2.  Draft structure and consultation network were discussed in Hungary on September 26 1999 during the presentation of a paper at the intermediate TICCIH conference on the Industrial Heritage of Mining and Iron Metallurgy. 

12.3.  Draft structure and consultation network to be placed on the international mining history societies web-sites.

12.4.  Structure to be presented to the working session of TICCIH 2000 to be held in Cardiff on Monday 4 September 2000.

12.5.  After final circulation to international consultees the report to be presented for approval by the TICCIH Board and forwarded to ICOMOS in Paris  by December 2000 for distribution as a TICCIH/ICOMOS occasional paper and presentation to the World Heritage Committee.

13.  Elements of a colliery and their evolution

13.1  The Planning and Design of Collieries;

13.1.1.  To an extent the form and scope for design was determined by the number of constituent parts of a colliery in any one period.  With time collieries became larger and with more sophisticated and diverse constituent parts. It was inevitable that long-established collieries should assume a rather random plan as they became rather disparate assemblages of structures from a range of different periods.

13.1.2.  Already in eighteenth-century Britain collieries were beginning to be fairly large and were producing coal either for export or for use in the growing manufacturing and smelting sectors.  The prime function of a colliery was to produce coal in the cheapest and most efficient manner.  Those colliery proprietors who were landowners or metal-works proprietors had sufficient capital to run collieries but were most concerned to fund their considerable functional infrastructure.  However, newly-built collieries could be designed and arranged symmetrically.  Thus the Tirdewnaw Colliery erected in 1767 by a copper-smelting concern at Swansea had a circular walled horse-engine walk interrupted at equidistant intervals by attached stores (‘a warehouse’), a colliers’ lodge and stables.  To its north in 1768 were designed a formal layout of five ‘head-colliers’ houses although only one semi-detached pair was ever built.

13.1.3.  As already discussed the emergence of steam and subsequently of electrical power gave firstly permanency and then a new common focus to the planning of collieries on a much larger scale than hitherto. 

13.2 Collieries Underground.

13.2.1  Underground mining was the predominant type of coal production until the huge mechanical and capital resources of the later twentieth-century made it feasible to lift deep areas of overburden and to work coal by opencast methods on a very extensive-scale that in many regions is supplanting underground mining.

13.2.2  An actual underground mine is the extractive part of any colliery and obviously the surface installations only exist to aid the production and processing of the mineral produced. 

13.2.3.  Recent excavation of early mine sites has shown the extent of their sophistication.  In fifteenth-century Midland England mines had developed gallery systems and rudimentary systems of ventilation.

13.2.4.  By the early nineteenth-century the largest coal-mines had many miles of galleries.

13.2.5  Substantial lined shafts and galleries existed in all mines and increased in scale and complexity with period.  Vaulted shaft-bottom galleries led into an ever-expanding network of main haulage ways equipped with haulage engines.

13.2.6   There are of course much greater difficulties of preservation with underground remains and with water-pumping unless gravity drainage is possible.

13.3   Winding Coal;

13.3.1   Horse and waterwheel-powered winding apparatus were pioneered in non-ferrous mines, particularly the large developed installations in German-speaking central Europe.  Waterwheel-winding had spread to the Great Northern Coalfield of Britain in the seventeenth century and horse-engines of varying sophistication were common by the eighteenth century.  The abundance of water in upland Wales also encouraged the use of water balance apparatus.  The spread of steam and then electric winding is discussed elsewhere in this document.

13.4  Colliery Shafthead Frames and Towers; 

13.4.1  The growing scale of these features, so much a popular icon of coalmining, is largely due  to the depth of the shaft and the type and form of motive-power employed. 

13.4.2  First of all manual power was used for winding on well-head type windlasses and such two-man windlasses were in common use by the eighteenth-century

13.4.3  More sophisticated apparatus had to elevated to a higher level and kept clear of the shafthead.  Some of the types of high supports for winding-pulleys are discussed in the relevant sections.

13.5  Water Pumping;

13.5.1  Water and steam-powered pumps and their housing have already been mentioned.

13.6. Mine Ventilation.

13.6.1  Coal and oil-shale workings require even more ventilation than mines for other ores or minerals because inflammable gases such as methane are often present.  In shallow mines carbon dioxide occurs naturally and can cause an oxygen deficiency.  The largest coal production in the seventeenth century was in British mines and effective ways of circulating the air were developed here.  Two air paths were essential for each working place: one for air entry and one for it to leave.  Two shafts were often used and to aid the process buckets containing fire were often suspended in one of the shafts.  

13.6.2.  In the nineteenth century fire buckets were often replaced by permanent furnaces.  On the surface these took the form of distinctive chimneys and some continued in use until about 1950.

13.6.3.  In the nineteenth-century Britain was still the largest coal producer in the world and in the early part of the century mechanical wind pumps were developed by engineers such as John Buddle.  From the 1830s large-diameter steam-driven fans with distinctive housings were adopted in the larger mines.

13.6.4.  By 1900 the USA had overtaken Britain as the largest coal producer and Germany and France were also becoming large-scale producers.  New types of smaller diameter electrically-driven centrifugal and axial-flow fans were developed.

13.7  The Use of Compressed  Air

13.7.1  There were problems in using steam underground and so compressed air was developed as an alternative.  It was first used successfully in France in 1845 when it was transmitted a distance of 750ft (228.45m) in a coal mine.  Its use internationally was rapid and in 1849 the pneumatic rock-drill was invented in the USA.

13.8 Preparation of Coal for Sale

13.8.1  Prior to the early nineteenth century little surface treatment was necessary as quality was maintained by selective working by hand in the mine itself.  Simple timber-built screens were built on the surface and hand-picking was practiced.

13.8.2  After c.1880 more elaborate and mechanised jigging screens and picking belts were introduced and coal washers were constructed to clean coal.  Coal washeries were introduced at about the same time to clean coal.  To facilitate the most effective flow of materials screens and washing facilities were usually built on stilts so that rails waggons or road vehicles could be loaded below.

13.8.3.  Rather different in form and purpose were the huge coal breakers developed in the United States for the processing of hard anthracite coal.  These were developed in the period of the late nineteenth-century as that country became the largest coal producer in the world and rather resembled non-ferrous mines processing floors but were much higher and extended from the top of headframes down to discharge points over railroad tracks.  The cladding of these huge buildings tended to be of timber. 

13.9   Workshops and Stores 

13.9.1  Stores and workshops would have been required from the days of the earliest collieries and certainly by the eighteenth-century storehouses are shown on colliery plans.  By the early nineteenth century even quite small collieries had one or two smithies with a carpenter’s shop.  As the size and sophistication of collieries increased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries so did the number of functional buildings designed to serve specialist purposes.  Subsidiary buildings often included stables, fitting-shops, sawmills, electricians’ shops, lamp rooms, explosives’ magazines and locomotive sheds. 

13.10   Colliery Offices

13.10.1   By the early nineteenth century colliery managers had offices, often in their on-site houses.  As nineteenth-century collieries became larger so did their administrative organisation and by the early twentieth century substantial office blocks were being built on colliery sites.  For a sizeable workforce of 3,000 there might at least be a general manager, an engineer and surveyor assisted by draughtsmen and clerks.[xvi]

13.11  Pithead Baths

13.11.1  Some pithead baths were available to miners in Germany, France and Belgium from 1880 and were in common use there from the beginning of the twentieth century when legislation in Germany ensured their use.  Legislation in Britain followed in 1911.  Early British baths were copied from mainland European practice and from the 1930s bath buildings in the modernist style were based on the work of the Dutch architect W.M. Dudok.  Other welfare buildings were based in bath buildings such as medical facilities and canteens.

The Criteria applied to major sites or monuments (grading to be applied later):

7.1.  Individually significant structures or monuments on colliery sites

7.1.1  Ironbridge Gorge World Heritage Site Collieries.  A number of significant colliery structures are included in this existing world heritage site.

7.1.2   Recorded coalmining to the south-west of the gorge started as early as 1235 when the monks of Buildwas were recorded as carrying coal away from Benthall.[xvii]  Benthall and Broseley, on the edge of the gorge were rated amongst the main collieries in Britain in 1635 with a total output of around 100,000 tons a year.[xviii]   There are two landscapes of the multiple earthworks of early and shallow ‘bell-pits’ (which may have had short galleries) in and around the Ironbridge Gorge at the Deer Leap (SJ 668015) in Broseley and in the woods near Caughley (SJ 695001).[xix]The Coalbrookdale Coalfield itself was the birthplace of the longwall method of mining coal which revolutionised the amount of coal that could be extracted from the ground without leaving the thick pillars that characterised the previous ‘pillar and stall method’ of mining.  There were colliery tunnels (‘drift mines’) up to 915m (1,000yds) long by the mid seventeenth century and this is where the method was possibly pioneered.[xx]

7.1.3   The earliest significant coalmining structure in the Ironbridge Gorge is the mine access tunnel called the Tar Tunnel originally built in 1786 and intended as an underground canal after the example of the Worsley Mines.  During construction at a distance of 275m (900ft) into the tunnel fossil tar was struck and exploited as a valuable resource.  The tunnel was extended to the coal shafts at Blists Hill and was used for mine drainage.  The brick-vaulted and lined tunnel has been conserved for about 100m (328ft) and is accessible to visitors.   

7.1.4   There were probably between 20 and 30 steam-powered pumping engines and more than a hundred steam winding-engines in local mines by 1800.  At the Lloyds (SJ 688031) in the Ironbridge Gorge is a  pumping shaft in which the pump rod of the last engine still remains, alongside the foundations of the last engine house.  It is possible that this is the site of one of the earliest engines in the coalfield, erected by the 1720s.  Within the Blist’s Hill Museum are the substantial foundations of a locally-developed Heslop engine, built in the 1790s and still working in 1912.  The nearby operational steam winding-engine was removed from the Milburgh Tileries at nearby Jackfield and occupies the site of a somewhat larger engine.[xxi]

7.1.5  Worsley Canal Mines.  With the contiguous Bridgewater Canal this was considered by contempories and is a founding monument of the world’s first industrial revolution.  The mines supplied the affordable coal that allowed the steam-powered textile mills of  Manchester to make it the cotton-spinning capital of the world, using cotton from North America, Egypt and the rest of the world.

7.1.6  The building of James Brindley’s economically very successful Bridgewater Canal in 1759-61 had a profound influence on nine decades of canal building in Europe and north America and the 11.7km long canal was merely an extension of what were eventually 42 miles of  navigable coal-mining tunnels on four different  levels.  This use of mine drainage to provide a means of underground and surface transport was widely copied in both Britain and in mainland Europe where the published work of ‘industrial spies’ describing their visits underground made the Worsley Mines world famous.

7.1.7  The earliest mention of coalmining at Worsley was in 1376 and in the mid seventeenth century construction was begun of the first of three fairly shallow colliery-drainage tunnels that were between 1,000 and 1,700 yards long.[xxii]   The much deeper twin navigable (still-watered) entrances to the coalmines of 1759-61 are set in the base of a high quarried sandstone cliff with a conserved canal basin at the entrance.  Nearby are several rows of eighteenth-century brick-built workers houses which surround the former workshops of the colliery and canal complex.

7.1.8  The tunnels continued to be maintained for mine drainage purposes until 1968 and the entrance is designated an ancient monument and has been conserved.  One of the most striking monuments inside is the inclined plane of 1795-96 which links canals at two levels and was drawn by  a French ‘industrial spy’ soon after construction.  The main mining level canal ran parallel to a fault and the many coal seams it intersected were each served by two branch waterways following the seam out crop at that level.  The main level had an eliptical arched top and half its depth was flooded as a canal.  Spoil from the colliery helped to build the embankments on the Bridgwater Canal and was also taken by a special canal branch to start the reclamation of the nearby bog of Chat Moss.  The beginning of complicated junctions, many vaulted in brick, were started in 1771 when a second parallel entrance tunnel was built that converges with the first some 500yds inside.  An upper canal was created from 1773 by widening the old ‘Massey Sough’ drainage tunnel that had been begun in 1729 and which was eventually 1¾ miles long. 

7.1.9  Le Grand-Hornu is important for retaining an early planned layout of elements of a colliery complex.  It is situated in the Borinage area of Wallonia, Belgium, the first area of the European mainland to be industrialised as the Industrial Revolution spread globally from Britain.  Coal from the area was widely used in northern France as well as Belgium.  The French coalmerchant Henri De Gorge married into the rich wholesale merchanting family of Eugénie Legrand of Lille.[xxiii]  He then acquired Hornu Colliery in 1810 and combined with the socially idealistic architect Bruno Renard in planning a complete coalmining township between 1816 and 1835.[xxiv]  By 1870-1921 there were some 2,300 workers and 250,000 tons of coal were produced annually.

7.1.10  The neo-classical central complex comprises two grand courtyards which have now been mostly conserved.  The pedimented triple-arched portal leads through the 100m long entrance façade with its hipped-roof corner pavilions into the entrance court which housed stables, vehicle-sheds, hay and straw stores.  A second gateway led through to a large arcaded elliptical central court and has high-vaulted engineering workshops for constructing steam-engines (1831) facing a pedimented office block with cupola.  The cathedral-like three-aisled seven-bay workshops included a foundry and assembly shop.  The two semicircular ends of this great enclosure are terminated by continuous curved arcades that once fronted other small workshops, garaging a fire-engine and for iron, oil and pattern stores.[xxv]   

7.1.11  Surrounding these former workshops and offices are some 425 workers’ houses (providing homes for some 2,500 people) which were exceptionally comfortable for the period and were set in a rectilinear layout of paved roads flanked by pavements.  Each collier’s house had a communal room, a kitchen and a bedroom on the ground floor with three bedrooms upstairs.  In the rear garden were a shed and toilet.  A well and oven were provided communally for every  ten houses.  The settlement is ornamented by two squares: Place Verte (‘The Green Square’) that formerly had a bandstand where the town band gave concerts twice a year in the Summer and Place Saint-Henri (‘The Saint-Henri Square’) facing the original de Gorge family residence.  A school, library, baths, a ballroom and eventually a hospital (the latter now demolished) were also added to this colliery settlement  that had been created on enlightened social lines.

7.1.12   The Grand-Hornu Colliery itself closed in 1954 and most of the functional surface elements of the shaftheads have been demolished.  However, the workshops, stables and offices together with the workers’ settlement still form a complex of international importance. 

7.1.13  Ruhr Malakoff Towers  Thirteen tall masonry shafthead Malakoff towers, built to contain colliery winding-gear in the second half of the nineteenth century, survive in the Ruhr and were influential internationally both as types of structures and as housings for the innovative Koepe system of winding.  They formed the central elements of the well-planned large complexes of substantial well-designed buildings that were the vehicle for the rapid rise of the Ruhr as one of the most productive deep mining coalfields in the world.  These impressive towers are up to 30m (100ft) in height with wall thicknesses up to 2.5m (8ft).  Adjacent buildings contained winding and pumping engines at right-angles or in line with the towers.  The heights of towers increased as coal pits became deeper and their appearance became more decorative with the application of castellated architecture.  Corner towers with separate staircases were added as fire escapes and steel headframes were often erected in, or on top of Malakoff Towers.  The towers were built in some numbers in the Saarland (where none remain) and in Upper Silesia.[xxvi]

7.1.14  The oldest of the Malakoff Towers is that at the Carl Pit in Essen-Altenessen of 1856-61.  The influential Koepe system of winding with a continuous cable was developed at the Hannover Pit in Bochum where the tower over Shaft One is preserved with a steam winding-engine of 1893 still preserved in the enginehouse alongside.[xxvii] 

7.1.15  The emergence of the United States of America as the world’s largest producer of coal at the end of the nineteenth century was achieved with strictly functional colliery layouts, often of timber, that have largely not survived in an intact state.  However, in the important coalmining state of Pennsylvania, the Scranton Anthracite Museum administers the following two sites: Pioneer Coal Mine Tunnel is 427m (1,400ft) long

and retains working areas on a steeply pitched seam.  The tunnel is accessible by a mine railway for the public and outside a steam locomotive is used to carry visitors to view old strip (i.e. opencast mines).  The Eckley Anthracite Village was built as a coal company township in 1854-61 with 54 buildings: four were added later.[xxviii] 

7.2.1   Integrated industrial areas:  either manufacturing or extractive which contain collieries as an essential part of the industrial landscape

7.2.2   Big Pit and other collieries which form part of the Blaenavon Industrial Landscape.   Besides Big Pit there is a large archaeological landscape of collieries at Blaenavon which includes:

7.2.3  Big Pit, besides being important for being an integral part of the relict industrial landscape serving the Blaenavon Ironworks (the second biggest in the world at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries) is also significant for being a good example of the longlived, accretional and purely functional nature of much typical British  colliery architecture.  It was the oldest working pit in south Wales which at the beginning of the twentieth century was the biggest coal exporting coalfield in the world and was from 1913 until 1921 the largest coalfield in Britain.

7.2.4  Particularly important are the complex of mining tunnels, many of which date from the opening years of the nineteenth-century.  These include the long stone-vaulted Engine Pit Level Tunnel of c.1810: the Engine Pit Shaft of 1810 and the lengthy brick-vaulted Forge and  Woods Levels driven before 1840.  The Coity Shaft (now used for ventilation) dates from c.1830 while the Big Pit Shaft which now takes visitors into the conserved workings was completed in 1860.  Gravity drainage from the hillside pit helps make the accessible preservation of underground galleries sustainable in the long term.  Further types of structures underground include a rare large stone-arched enginehouse tunnel vault of c.1840 that would have housed a beam winding-engine for underground haulage and two full sets of underground stables.  Other structures include underground workshops and two haulage-engines in their housings.

7.2.5  To the south-east of  Big Pit is the contemporary grid layout of the workers settlement of Forgeside where colliers and workers at the new iron furnaces alongside where housed in a settlement with a central school and chapel.

7.2.6  The industrial landscape at Blaenavon includes the structures and earthworks of extensive late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century coalworking including some of the features mentioned here.  One such colliery has left Twin Circular Stone-lined shafts and a water reservoir (SO 2445 0959), 200ft deep, dating from before 1812 with associated water reservoir earthworks interpreted as supplying water for a colliery winding waterwheel.[xxix]  There is much evidence in the landscape for the early technique of hushing, or scouring, the process of impounding water with dams and then releasing it to expose seams by removing overburden.

7.2.7  One of the very long mining tunnels in the Blaenavon landscape at Pwll-du was

1,000m long by 1800.  It was later lengthened to 2,400m and by 1817 was in use as a through-railway tunnel: the longest tunnel on a surface railway then built.

7.2.8  The landscape also includes some of the earliest open-cast working in Britain which dates from 1941.  Earlier mining of this type had been done in the U.S.A. and Germany and machinery was brought in from the U.S.A. and Panama.  Canadian Army troops helped develop the work which achieved a peak of 8.65 million tons in 1944: almost 5% of the total output of Great Britain.    

7.3.1   Large colliery complexes

7.3.2   Chatterley-Whitfield Colliery  is important for being the only large nineteenth-century colliery surface layout to remain intact in England and is representative of the collieries which were the world’s largest at that time.  It achieved fame as one of the first mines to produce over a million tons.  The multi-shaft layout and the incremental growth of the surface buildings and buildings is characteristic of nineteenth-century collieries in Britain.

7.3.3   The Platt Shaft, the first of an eventual six, was sunk in 1843.  Latterly electrical power was used in the colliery but the horizontal twin-cylinder steam winding-engine of 1914 at the Hesketh Shaft remains intact with 914.4mm (36in) diameter cylinders and a 6.096m (20ft) diameter winding-drum in a large engine-house.[xxx]  Elsewhere on the site are the Institute, Middle, Engine and Winstanley shafts: the steel headframes over the Hesketh, Institute and and Platt Shafts are the standard type of British Headframe evolved in the late nineteenth century .[xxxi]

7.3.4  By contrast the headgear of the Winstanley Pit is carried on a tall masonry tower which has been described as of German type: being seen as a plainer version of the elaborate Malakoff Towers but without Koepe continuous winding-gear.

7.3.5  Zollern 2-4 Colliery, Dortmund, Germany is particularly important for representing a complete rethink in the planning and rationalisation of collieries.  In a deliberate act Emil Kirdorf, the then director-general of Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks AG, created a model colliery layout merging the disparate engine-houses into one common enginehall.  That process was facilitated by the new energy-source of electricity that was provided to replace the earlier universal use of coal.

7.3.6  The original machinery installed in the Dortmund engine-hall has mostly survived: most importantly the world’s oldest electric winding-engine dating from 1904 remains in situ as do the generators, compressor and converters.  This concentration of a colliery’s machines in one engine-hall, or machine house, was of international importance and can be demonstrated to have been copied internationally.

7.3.7  The enginehall is of some architectural importance as an outstanding example of the  new international Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) architecture.  The buildings in the colliery yard area were built by the architect Paul Knobbe between 1900 and 1904 in the revivalist historical architecture that had been traditional in grander colliery layouts up to that period.  The industrialist Paul Knobbe had seen the pavilions built by the structural engineer Reinhold Krohn and the architect Bruno Möhring at the Dusseldorf Exhibition in 1902 and subsequently commissioned them to build an engine-hall with a steel framework incorporating glass and brick.  Möhring designed the main portal in the form of a shell on the outside and on the inside as a vine arbour.  Panes of glass in violet, green and blue light interior idiosyncratic features such as those in the electrical control centre.  A brass clock hangs from the ceiling while the fittings themselves were inset into the marble walls between Egyptian-style Art Nouveau portals and pilasters.  Möhring took his inspiratrion for the bright green external paintwork used on the steel framework of the machine house from the entrances to the Paris Metro which were designed by the French architect Hector Guimard.[xxxii] 

7.3.8  The original headrames to the two shafts were to the north and south of the engine-hall and were demolished following closure but have been replaced by contemporary headframes brought in from Gelsenkirchen and Herne Collieries.  The demolished shaft-head building from the winding-shaft has been replaced by a replica.  The washery and neighbouring coke works have also been demolished.

7.3.9  All the buildings were laid-out on a regular grid.  The approach road from the attached colliery workers’ settlement was flanked by trees.  The colliery entrance was flanked by two brick buildings of 1902: the gatehouse and first-aid station.  To the north are the carpenter’s shop, blacksmiths’ forge, fitting shop, stables, outbuildings, sheds, coachman’s rooms and the fire-fighting equipment.  To the south are the former wages room, the workers’ baths, magazines, the lamp room and rooms for the caretaker, shift foreman and the young miners in one large building.

7.3.10  Zeche Zollverein (Colliery) at Essen in the Ruhr mining district of Germany eventually comprised twelve shafts on five main sites: four shafts and a coke-works remain on immediately adjacent sites by Zollverein 12.  It is remarkable for the quality of the buildings and the layout of the shafthead of Zollverein 12 which was designed as the central shaft of the complex in 1928-32 at a time when German coal production was becoming the largest in Europe.[xxxiii]

7.3.11  The importance of the complex is enhanced by the survival of parts of the earlier pits of the colliery and by the extensive colliery workers’ housing which surrounds the cluster of shaftheads.  Zollverein 12 is a fine piece of modernist functional architecture designed  by  the specialist colliery and industrial architects Martin Kremmer and Fritz Schupp. The adjacent Cokeworks, which had been intended as part of the original scheme, was completed by Fritz Schupp in 1958-61. 

7.3.12  The layout of the Zollverein 12 pithead is based on a grid with the road access based on two axes flanked by buildings and lawns (‘the Westphalian Style’) and terminated by two impressive and centrally aligned engineering features.  One is the great  winding-frame (supported by four symmetrical inclined struts) with Koepe winding over the tall brown-brick tower of the shafthead  and the other is the central tower and tall chimney of the boilerhouse.  Most of the machinery of the colliery has been conserved intact among a successful programme of re-use.  All surface buildings have been retained including the washery.    

7.3.13  The Zollverein complex was producing over 1,000,000 tonnes by 1890 and about 2,300,000 by 1890 and employment rose from 2,000 to 6,526 people.  By 1914 architects were involved in the design of  543 workers’ houses.

7.3.14  In 1926 the Zollverein Pits  became part of Europe’s largest mining complex as part of the new steel/coal combine Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG.  This large group instigated a rationalisation programme based on the construction of a small number of pits with high outputs.  Zollverein 12 was one of these.  In 1932 and 1934-49 the production of the Zollverein Colliery was the largest on the Ruhr and in 1937 production peaked at a maximum output of 3,588,000 tonnes.  In the 1950s there was a change to skip winding at Zollverein 12  and in 1957 and 1972 shaft 12 was deepened to an eventual 1,005m.  In 1986 the whole of the Zollverein Colliery closed except for pumping at shaft 12.  The coking works closed in 1993.

7.3.15  The re-use of the shaft 12 buildings has retained much of the plant intact including a low-pressure compressor, a turbo compressor, a boiler and the washery.

7.3.16  The ‘Industrial cultural landscape’ of the Zollverein Colliery has been nominated as a proposed world heritage site and this includes the boundary of the whole Zollverein colliery as it operated from 1847 to 1986.  This includes the several estates of extensive colliery housing that was constructed from 1847 onwards.  It includes interesting social experiments such the ‘Pestalozzi Villages’ built from 1953 which consisted of young miners living with married couples who acted as surrogate parents.  The predominant housing type on the other extensive estates were buildings subdivided into four, each apartment provided with a generous plot of about 640sq m so that vegetables could be grown.[xxxiv] 

 7.3.17  Two of the  four earlier shafthead complexes of the Zollverein Mine (2-3 shafts each) retain a more eclectic mix of structures and machinery including some earlier structures.

7.3.18   The shafthead complex of Zollverein shafts 1,2 and 8 are sited immediately next to the shafthead of Zollverein 12 and the Zollverein coking plant .  When Zollverein 12 was built it was used solely for winding coal while the miners entered and left via shafts 1 and 2.  The Zollverein 1 shaft sunk in 1847 has a brick winding-engine house of 1903 (designed by the architect Herr Fuller) capped by a barrel-shaped roof  and was re-equipped with a 2860 kW electric winding-engine in 1957.  The adjoining Zollverein 2 shaft of 1847, deepened to 1005m, is surmounted by a tertiary enclosed steelwork tower capped by a 2000 kW Koepe winding engine of 1950.  The tower was designed in 1950 by the colliery architect Fritz Schupp  and moved from a colliery at Bochum to replace a 1923 headframe over shaft 2 in 1964-65.  The common engine-hall of 1903, with its twin barrel-shaped roofs and round-headed windows, is part of the same layout as the shaft 1 winding-house and originally contained a steam-turbine generator and a compressor and fan.  A separate fan-house of 1917 was re-equipped with an axial electric fan in 1964 and was designed by the architect Herr Stolze as were the  engine shed (1921), the stores (1922) and the colliery baths (1906) with its barrel-shaped roof.  The oldest building on the site was designed in the same classical style as the original Malakoff Towers (demolished) and was the 2 storey hipped-roof colliery offices of 1878 which were converted to office workers’ housing when new neo-baroque offices were built by Stolze in 1906. Adjacent to the original offices is a colliery manager’s house built in matching style.

7.3.19  Zollverein Pits 3/7 were sunk in 1881 but were reduced in importance and partly demolished after the new central winding-shaft at Zollverein 12 was opened in 1932.  Remaining is the headframe of shaft 10 which was added in 1913.  The adjoining twin winding-engine houses and converter were built as a three-aisled structure in 1913/20.  A 741 kW electric winder of 1920 and contemporary converter remain in situ.  An engine-hall of 1913-17, partly demolished in 1952,  contains a crane of 1918 and a turbo compressor of 1952.