'The best sun we have is made of Newcastle coal,' said the politician and writer Horace Walpole in 1768. Over the following century the metaphors magnified. Coal was lauded as 'black diamonds', 'real gold' and 'the bread of industry'.
'Coal alone can command,' opined the economist William Jevons, a judgement confirmed by his contemporary Lord Armstrong, an industrialist who told the 1863 British Association meeting in Newcastle that this 'invaluable mineral… stored up… for our benefit is sufficient for many thousands of years… coal may be considered as practically inexhaustible.' If only.
At the start of the 20th century nearly a quarter of a million men and boys worked in the Great Northern Coalfield cutting more than 56 million tonnes of coal each year from nearly 400 pits. By the beginning of the 21st century the industry was gone. The collapse of grand-scale carboniferous capitalism is an interpretive challenge for museum curators and social historians.
Woodhorn Colliery near Ashington was a small but highly productive part of that massive coalfield. The first shaft was sunk in 1894 and it closed in 1981. The original Woodhorn Museum was a brilliantly evocative tribute to the local mining community.
Housed in colliery buildings in the shadows of rare surviving winding, fan and engine houses, the vibrant excellence of Woodhorn shamed the more mundane mining exhibitions at the National Coalmining Museum for England near Wakefield and Big Pit in South Wales.
Now a great deal of cash - £16m - from councils, development agencies and the lottery has expanded the site. The pithead buildings have been restored and the county record office is in a shiny new study centre, (albeit accessible only by car or a rare bus). There are new interactive and video displays, and vastly improved educational, catering and conference facilities.
In the questioning words of the new Woodhorn's energetic and innovative Antipodean director, Neil Anderson: 'Is it a museum? Is it interactive art? Is it a country park? Is it an information station? It's a BIG adventure… the story of Northumberland and the story of the impact of the wider world on our area.'
The mission statement perhaps reflects the aspirations of its funders. It promises a 'new and rejuvenating freedom in hospitality, heritage, IT, sales and tourism… the site is designed to celebrate the future'.
Such development-speak brings old curatorial fogies like me out in hot flushes. As does the remorselessly cheery tone of the publicity material extolling potential visitors to Get Lost! Splash out! Hook a Whopper! Disappear in Space! Change your Underpants! Singalong with Florrie! Be Dazzled by Digital! Discover your Breaking Point! Take a Bunch for Lunch!
The guidebook itself is a lexicon of cliches - crammed full of brave hearts, bright sparks, dying days, gold rushes, pony expresses, busy lizzies, iron ladies and tough cookies, thrills, spills and Time Lords. This is the vocabulary of ad-land at its most trivial.
And yet, despite the twee tinsel wrapping, there is a solid core of achievement at Woodhorn. The new building with its distinctive coal-cutter fascia sits well with the pithead itself. The Winding House, Cappel Fan House and Pick Sharpener's Shop can be visited independently.
Access to the Walker Fan House and Crab Engine is by pre-booked guided tour only, but worth the pre-planning. These few remaining buildings have a sombre grandeur that has not been spoilt. You can smell and taste the coal dust.
In the main building Coal Town has five interlocking galleries that splice a chronological journey through the industrial and social history of Ashington with national and world events. A slogan at the entrance sets the tone: 'Pits, picnics, pinnies, pigeons and picket lines.'
Against the dark dangers below are set the activities that bonded the community on the surface. Life is well illustrated - there are brass bands, leek shows and annual picnics, while racing pigeons and whippets vie with football. Shout down a pit shaft for a centre forward, went the legend, and up popped half a dozen.
The greatest of them all was a young colliery fitter called Jackie Milburn. Famous sons in future generations were the Charlton brothers, Bobby and Jack. The nostalgia, with its true meaning - recollection with pain - is handled with sentiment and not a trace of sentimentality.
The political struggles, the creation of unions, cut wages and mass strikes are articulated with great skill, but with a clear division of heroes and villains. 'I never scabbed,' reads one badge, 'MacGregor, Maggie's Fool' another. Banners celebrate the Wives Support Group. Food parcels from across Europe are shown, including an unopened jar of sauerkraut.
The displays, though thin in places, are evocative and moving. They would be better still with more emphatic gradings of light and dark and the galleries need more sound.
One of the great glories of Woodhorn has always been the works of the Ashington group of 'pitmen painters'. They are not part of the official collections, but are on show in a temporary exhibition gallery.
They are far from the usual artistic title of 'primitive'. Austere and dispassionate, they have the power to move you to tears. These artworks alone are worth a visit to Woodhorn and will hopefully remain on display. Potent, too, are the mining banners that hang over the heads of visitors walking the ramp to the upper floors - battle honours in a secular cathedral.
For all my doubts and quibbles I was eventually won over by the new Woodhorn. It is on course to attract four times as many visitors as its predecessor. As you drive to and from the site along the coast and through the relics of coalfields, remember those wise words of postwar Labour minister Aneurin Bevan: 'This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organising genius could produce a shortage.'
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum
Project data
Cost: £16m
Main funders: Heritage Lottery Fund £10m, Wansbeck Council, Northumberland County Council, Northumberland Strategic Partnership, One NorthEast, Northern Rock Foundation, Coalfields Regeneration Trust, English Heritage
Exhibition design: Haley Sharpe
Architect: RMJM
'Coal alone can command,' opined the economist William Jevons, a judgement confirmed by his contemporary Lord Armstrong, an industrialist who told the 1863 British Association meeting in Newcastle that this 'invaluable mineral… stored up… for our benefit is sufficient for many thousands of years… coal may be considered as practically inexhaustible.' If only.
At the start of the 20th century nearly a quarter of a million men and boys worked in the Great Northern Coalfield cutting more than 56 million tonnes of coal each year from nearly 400 pits. By the beginning of the 21st century the industry was gone. The collapse of grand-scale carboniferous capitalism is an interpretive challenge for museum curators and social historians.
Woodhorn Colliery near Ashington was a small but highly productive part of that massive coalfield. The first shaft was sunk in 1894 and it closed in 1981. The original Woodhorn Museum was a brilliantly evocative tribute to the local mining community.
Housed in colliery buildings in the shadows of rare surviving winding, fan and engine houses, the vibrant excellence of Woodhorn shamed the more mundane mining exhibitions at the National Coalmining Museum for England near Wakefield and Big Pit in South Wales.
Now a great deal of cash - £16m - from councils, development agencies and the lottery has expanded the site. The pithead buildings have been restored and the county record office is in a shiny new study centre, (albeit accessible only by car or a rare bus). There are new interactive and video displays, and vastly improved educational, catering and conference facilities.
In the questioning words of the new Woodhorn's energetic and innovative Antipodean director, Neil Anderson: 'Is it a museum? Is it interactive art? Is it a country park? Is it an information station? It's a BIG adventure… the story of Northumberland and the story of the impact of the wider world on our area.'
The mission statement perhaps reflects the aspirations of its funders. It promises a 'new and rejuvenating freedom in hospitality, heritage, IT, sales and tourism… the site is designed to celebrate the future'.
Such development-speak brings old curatorial fogies like me out in hot flushes. As does the remorselessly cheery tone of the publicity material extolling potential visitors to Get Lost! Splash out! Hook a Whopper! Disappear in Space! Change your Underpants! Singalong with Florrie! Be Dazzled by Digital! Discover your Breaking Point! Take a Bunch for Lunch!
The guidebook itself is a lexicon of cliches - crammed full of brave hearts, bright sparks, dying days, gold rushes, pony expresses, busy lizzies, iron ladies and tough cookies, thrills, spills and Time Lords. This is the vocabulary of ad-land at its most trivial.
And yet, despite the twee tinsel wrapping, there is a solid core of achievement at Woodhorn. The new building with its distinctive coal-cutter fascia sits well with the pithead itself. The Winding House, Cappel Fan House and Pick Sharpener's Shop can be visited independently.
Access to the Walker Fan House and Crab Engine is by pre-booked guided tour only, but worth the pre-planning. These few remaining buildings have a sombre grandeur that has not been spoilt. You can smell and taste the coal dust.
In the main building Coal Town has five interlocking galleries that splice a chronological journey through the industrial and social history of Ashington with national and world events. A slogan at the entrance sets the tone: 'Pits, picnics, pinnies, pigeons and picket lines.'
Against the dark dangers below are set the activities that bonded the community on the surface. Life is well illustrated - there are brass bands, leek shows and annual picnics, while racing pigeons and whippets vie with football. Shout down a pit shaft for a centre forward, went the legend, and up popped half a dozen.
The greatest of them all was a young colliery fitter called Jackie Milburn. Famous sons in future generations were the Charlton brothers, Bobby and Jack. The nostalgia, with its true meaning - recollection with pain - is handled with sentiment and not a trace of sentimentality.
The political struggles, the creation of unions, cut wages and mass strikes are articulated with great skill, but with a clear division of heroes and villains. 'I never scabbed,' reads one badge, 'MacGregor, Maggie's Fool' another. Banners celebrate the Wives Support Group. Food parcels from across Europe are shown, including an unopened jar of sauerkraut.
The displays, though thin in places, are evocative and moving. They would be better still with more emphatic gradings of light and dark and the galleries need more sound.
One of the great glories of Woodhorn has always been the works of the Ashington group of 'pitmen painters'. They are not part of the official collections, but are on show in a temporary exhibition gallery.
They are far from the usual artistic title of 'primitive'. Austere and dispassionate, they have the power to move you to tears. These artworks alone are worth a visit to Woodhorn and will hopefully remain on display. Potent, too, are the mining banners that hang over the heads of visitors walking the ramp to the upper floors - battle honours in a secular cathedral.
For all my doubts and quibbles I was eventually won over by the new Woodhorn. It is on course to attract four times as many visitors as its predecessor. As you drive to and from the site along the coast and through the relics of coalfields, remember those wise words of postwar Labour minister Aneurin Bevan: 'This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organising genius could produce a shortage.'
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum
Project data
Cost: £16m
Main funders: Heritage Lottery Fund £10m, Wansbeck Council, Northumberland County Council, Northumberland Strategic Partnership, One NorthEast, Northern Rock Foundation, Coalfields Regeneration Trust, English Heritage
Exhibition design: Haley Sharpe
Architect: RMJM
