Tower Colliery
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Tower Colliery ( Welsh: Glofa'r Tŵr) was the oldest continuously working deep-
coal mine Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from ...
in the
United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
, and possibly the world, until its closure in 2008. It was the last mine of its kind to remain in the South Wales Valleys. It was located near the villages of Hirwaun and
Rhigos Rhigos () is a small village on the saddle of higher ground between the Vale of Neath and the Cynon Valley. It was part of the old Neath Rural district Council under Glamorgan until 1974. The village then came under the jurisdiction of The Cynon ...
, north of the town of Aberdare in the
Cynon Valley Cynon Valley () is a former coal mining valley in Wales. Cynon Valley lies between Rhondda and the Merthyr Valley and takes its name from the River Cynon. Aberdare is located in the north of the valley and Mountain Ash is in the south of th ...
of South
Wales Wales ( cy, Cymru ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by England to the east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the Bristol Channel to the south. It had a population in ...
.


History

With
coal Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. Coal is formed when ...
located so close to the surface, it was known by locals to be possible to
drift mine Drift mining is either the mining of an ore deposit by underground methods, or the working of coal seams accessed by adits driven into the surface outcrop of the coal bed. A drift mine is an underground mine in which the entry or access is above ...
coal from Hirwaun common. This activity increased from 1805, until in 1864 the first drift named Tower was started, named after the nearby Crawshay's Tower, a
folly In architecture, a folly is a building constructed primarily for decoration, but suggesting through its appearance some other purpose, or of such extravagant appearance that it transcends the range of usual garden buildings. Eighteenth-cent ...
built in 1848 and named after Richard Crawshay. In 1941, a new shaft was sunk to a depth of 160 metres. From 1943 until closure, this shaft was used as the main "return" ventilation shaft and for the transport of men. In 1958 Tower No. 3 was driven to meet the No. 4 colliery workings, and was used as the main "intake" airway, conveying coal to the surface and transporting materials into the mine working areas. The Aberdare branch of the Merthyr line continued north from Aberdare railway station to the colliery. While passenger services terminate in Aberdare, freight services operated several times a day along this stretch of line, directly owned by the colliery.


British Coal closure

After the 1984/5 UK miners' strike, the Conservative government authorised British Coal to close the majority of the UK's deep mines on economic grounds, nominally including Tower. But from 30 June 1986, with new underground roads having been driven, all coal from
Mardy Colliery Maerdy Colliery was a coal mine located in the South Wales village of Maerdy ( cy, Y Maerdy), in the Rhondda Valley, located in the county borough of Rhondda Cynon Taf, and within the historic county boundaries of Glamorgan, Wales. Opened in 18 ...
was also raised at Tower, the two mines effectively working as one coalfield system. Mardy closed as an access shaft on 21 December 1990. In October 1993 the red flag was raised on Hirwaun common as a symbol of unity between workers of Tower Colliery during a march to commemorate the
Merthyr Rising The Merthyr Rising, also referred to as the Merthyr Riots, of 1831 was the violent climax to many years of simmering unrest among the large working class population of Merthyr Tydfil in Wales and the surrounding area. The Rising marked the fi ...
in 1831, and highlight the plight of their own pit. In 1994, the constituency MP, Ann Clwyd staged a sit-in in the mine to protest against its closure, accompanied by the late Glyndwr 'Glyn' Roberts (Senior) of
Penywaun Penywaun (also in ) is a community, electoral ward and north-western suburb of Aberdare in the Cynon Valley within the county borough of Rhondda Cynon Taf, Wales. At the 2011 census, the population of the ward was registered as 3,063. Etymolog ...
. British Coal closed Tower Colliery on 22 April 1994, on the grounds that it would be uneconomic in current market conditions to continue production.


Colliery buy-out by workers

Led by local NUM Branch Secretary
Tyrone O'Sullivan Tyrone O'Sullivan, OBE (born 1945), is a Welsh former National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) Branch Secretary, and current Chairman of Goitre Tower Anthracite Ltd., the owners of Tower Colliery. Early life O'Sullivan was born in the heart of ...
, 239 miners joined TEBO (Tower Employees Buy-Out), with each pledging £8,000 from their redundancy payouts to buy back Tower. Against stiff central government resistance to the possibility of reopening the mine as a coal production unit, a price of £2 million was eventually agreed. With their bid accepted, the miners marched back to the pit on 2 January 1995, with a
balloon A balloon is a flexible bag that can be inflated with a gas, such as helium, hydrogen, nitrous oxide, oxygen, and air. For special tasks, balloons can be filled with smoke, liquid water, granular media (e.g. sand, flour or rice), or light so ...
inflated for each worker. On 3 January 1995 the Colliery re-opened under the ownership of the workforce buy out company Goitre Tower Anthracite.
Philip Weekes Philip Gordon Weekes (12 June 1920 – 26 June 2003) was a Welsh mining engineer. As the National Coal Board's manager of the South Wales coalfields, Weekes played an important role mediating between the two sides of the miners' strike of 1984-8 ...
, the renowned Welsh mining engineer, was a key advisor to the buy-out team and became (unpaid) Chairman.Times online
/ref> In 2014,
John Redwood Sir John Alan Redwood (born 15 June 1951) is a British politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Wokingham in Berkshire since 1987. A member of the Conservative Party, he was Secretary of State for Wales in the Major governm ...
, the
Secretary of State for Wales The secretary of state for Wales ( cy, ysgrifennydd gwladol Cymru), also referred to as the Welsh secretary, is a secretary of state in the Government of the United Kingdom, with responsibility for the Wales Office. The incumbent is a member ...
in 1995, and also Director of
Margaret Thatcher Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher (; 13 October 19258 April 2013) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 to 1990. She was the first female British prime ...
's
Number 10 Policy Unit The Number 10 Policy Unit is a body of policymakers based in 10 Downing Street, providing policy advice directly to the British Prime Minister. Originally set up to support Harold Wilson in 1974, it has gone through a series of guises to suit the ...
1983–1985, wrote of the period of pit closures and Tower Colliery:
At the end of the dispute I tried to get the government to offer the miners the right to work a pit the Coal Board claimed was uneconomic for themselves, as I was suspicious about some of the pits the Coal Board wished to close. I wanted a magnanimous aftermath. John Moore the privatisation Minister worked up some proposals but they got into the press before they were fully thought through or cleared with the PM, so the whole idea was lost. It was not until I was in the Cabinet myself that I was able to help one group of miners do just that, at Tower Colliery. They demonstrated that free of Coal Board control it was possible, at least in their case, to run the pit for longer.


Operations

Up to 14 coal seams had been worked at Tower Colliery during its history, and the neighbouring mines within the lease area of Tower, which was 14.8 km in circumference to create an area of 221.3
hectares The hectare (; SI symbol: ha) is a non-SI metric unit of area equal to a square with 100-metre sides (1 hm2), or 10,000 m2, and is primarily used in the measurement of land. There are 100 hectares in one square kilometre. An acre is a ...
. The actual boundaries of the lease were defined either by faults or seam splits in the local geostructure, or excess water to the northwest in the Bute seam. The seams produced good quality
coking coal Metallurgical coal or coking coal is a grade of coal that can be used to produce good-quality coke. Coke is an essential fuel and reactant in the blast furnace process for primary steelmaking. The demand for metallurgical coal is highly coupled ...
, which was washed onsite at a
coal washing 300px, A coal "washer" in Eastern Kentucky A modern coal breaker in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania combines washing, crushing, grading, sorting, stockpiling, and shipping in one facility built into a stockpile of anthracite coal below a mountain top ...
plant built in the mid-1980s, after extraction through the hillside on a conveyor belt. Although the mine remained financially viable and continued to provide employment to the workers, by the time of the buyout the only seam worked at Tower was the Seven Feet/Five Feet, a combined seam of several leaves which offered 1.3m of anthracite in a mined section of 1.65m. Working directly under the shaft of the former Glyncorrwg Colliery's "nine feet" workings, the four faces worked in the western section of the lease were considered uneconomic by British Coal. As the worked seam reduced in capacity, the management team considered three possibilities to extend the length of mine production: *Work another nine faces in the existing workings, in coal classed only as mineral potential *Address the water problem in the Bute seam, to the northwest *Open new developments in the Nine Feet seam, 100 m above the existing seam; the Four Feet seam, a further 30 m above But none of these prospects seemed economic, so the board recommended that work be concentrated on coal to the north of the existing workings, which had been left to protect the safety of the existing shafts. Accepted by the workforce and shareholders in an open vote, this decision effectively accepted the end of Tower as a deep mine.


Second closure

Having mined out the northern coal extracts, the colliery was last worked on 18 January 2008 and the official closure of the colliery occurred on 25 January. The colliery was, until its closure, one of the largest employers in the
Cynon Valley Cynon Valley () is a former coal mining valley in Wales. Cynon Valley lies between Rhondda and the Merthyr Valley and takes its name from the River Cynon. Aberdare is located in the north of the valley and Mountain Ash is in the south of th ...
. Machinery from Tower was used to boost production at the nearby Aberpergwm Colliery, a smaller
drift mine Drift mining is either the mining of an ore deposit by underground methods, or the working of coal seams accessed by adits driven into the surface outcrop of the coal bed. A drift mine is an underground mine in which the entry or access is above ...
closed by the
National Coal Board The National Coal Board (NCB) was the statutory corporation created to run the nationalised coal mining industry in the United Kingdom. Set up under the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act 1946, it took over the United Kingdom's collieries on "ve ...
in 1985 but reopened by a private concern in the mid 1990s.


Tower regeneration

The management announced at closure that one of the possibilities of creating additional short term value was through
open cast mining Open-pit mining, also known as open-cast or open-cut mining and in larger contexts mega-mining, is a surface mining technique of extracting rock or minerals from the earth from an open-air pit, sometimes known as a borrow. This form of minin ...
extraction of the residual 6  million tonnes of anthracite. In August 2010, the company filed a planning application for the extraction by open cast mining of coal to a depth of , on a section of the former coal washery site. Coal would then be transported to
Aberthaw Power Station Aberthaw Power Station refers to two decommissioned coal-fired and co-fired biomass power stations on the coast of South Wales, near Barry in the Vale of Glamorgan. They were located at Limpert Bay, near the villages of Gileston and West Aberth ...
by train. In 2012 Tower Regeneration Ltd, a
joint venture A joint venture (JV) is a business entity created by two or more parties, generally characterized by shared ownership, shared returns and economic risk, risks, and shared governance. Companies typically pursue joint ventures for one of four rea ...
partnership between Tower Colliery Ltd and Hargreaves Services plc was formed. The partnership company received planning permission that year to allow opencast coal extraction on what were termed the surface workings of the former colliery site, on the pre-condition that the site would be subject to land remediation and reclamation, followed by land restoration of the entire Tower Colliery site. The land reclamation works includes: removal of structures; removal of residual contamination; re-profiling of colliery spoil tips; removal of coal workings and mine entries; and provision of surface drainage. The project will create a sloping landform to reproduce semi-natural habitats on the site, and hence prepare the area ground for future mixed-use development.


Future plan

The shareholders are still debating the future of the site, which they eventually wish to have developed to leave a legacy for the area which provides employment. Eventually there are plans to develop the site, with combinations of housing, industrial estate,
industrial heritage Industrial heritage refers to the physical remains of the history of technology and industry, such as manufacturing and mining sites, as well as power and transportation infrastructure. Another definition expands this scope so that the term a ...
museum or tourism resort being debated with several potential partners.


References


External links


Breaking new ground at Tower CollieryWhat is the Tower Fund?BBC News: Miner-owned pit faces closure 27 January 2006Photographs of miners taken at Tower Colliery
{{coord, 51.727, -3.555, type:landmark_region:GB, display=title Buildings and structures in Rhondda Cynon Taf Collieries in South Wales Co-operatives in the United Kingdom Underground mines in Wales