The Sunshine Miners
"From the state rooms you looked out on a landscape as bleak and blasted as a view of the Somme, an idyll, as it seemed to me then, irretrievably lost… But of course I was wrong. It wasn't irretrievable, and to look at the grounds today one would have no idea that such a violation had ever occurred.” Alan Bennett on Temple Newsam.
This video piece was created to accompany Conflux Coldwell's "The Sunshine Miners" album on Woodford Halse, 2025.
The visuals make use of Coldwell's "deconstructed rephotography" method, where old images are projected over new ones, but in places where the changes between then-and-now are so profound that different times appear as entirely different worlds... Vintage photographs are replaced here by archival footage, helping to represent the hidden history of opencast mining in the UK, and revealing the real-time erasure of cultural memory in the re-landscape of Orgreave.
Conflux Coldwell’s latest album explores a disappearing industrial landscape near his hometown of Leeds, UK. Many country parks and wildlife reserves in this part of Yorkshire have a hidden history as quarries and open cast mines. This was the domain of the “sunshine miners”, who worked the coal seams above ground, an oft-neglected part of Britain’s industrial story.
Amongst the reeds and bird calls of RSPB St Aidan’s, you will find a massive dragline and monument to these workers, the last trace that this rural haven was once a devastating scar on the landscape. The sunshine now falls on the dogwalkers and birdwatchers who drift about, blissfully unaware of this troubled legacy, past deep lakes that were once huge chasms in the ground, filled with weird machinery. In 1988 the River Aire burst its banks and inundated the mine, ceasing production for 10 years.
Down the road at Waverley new parkland occupies the site of the battle of Orgreave – the infamous fight with police at the height of the miner’s strikes. Another overlooked monument to this dark chapter lies lonely in the grass. The local river, once the most polluted in the UK, has been re-routed and cleaned up. The area is now rich in wildlife, but completely unrecognisable. Even the change of name seems to seek to erase this history.
After decades in terminal decline, coal mining in the UK ceased entirely this year, with no plans to ever restart. This milestone seemed like a good opportunity for the artist to explore his own family history in mining, and the lasting impact of opencast on the natural environment. Coldwell began the project making field recordings of wildlife at these sites, supplementing them with layers of drone and analogue synthesiser sequences, including the use of an early 80s Casio keyboard that he bought in a former mining town, not far from the derelict remains of the coal-fired power station at Willington. As such, The Sunshine Miners feels like a natural successor to his work on The Phantomatic Coast (2022), where a haunted sense of place was also evoked using field recordings, tape loops and samples from salvaged equipment and old media - another kind of mining, in a way, searching for sunshine in the dark.