September 2024. Franck and Simon travel the roads of the United Kingdom to meet the men and women who once gave life to emblematic places in now obsolete industrial regions. From Kent to Yorkshire, passing through Wales, the photographer and the pen talk with personalities who tell their story and bear witness to a past full of meaning.
In this excerpt from Memories of Coal, Franck and Simon walk on the ruins of Orgreave’s cokery in Yorkshire, scene of bloody clashes between miners on strike and law enforcement.
🇫🇷 Lire cet article en Français.
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🖋 The text was written by Simon.
📸 The photographs were captured on film by Franck ↗︎.
🔗 Support the campaign of Franck and Simon by contributing to the crowdfunding campaign ↗ from the complete reporting called Memories of Coal.
Memories of coal
This post is an excerpt from a long investigative work that gives rise, in 2025, to the publication of a written and photographed report: Memories of Coal.
Franck and Simon launched a crowdfunding campaign to support the printing costs of this 188-page report, written in French and English.
Support them by participating in the campaign ↗︎.
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Midday strikes, and the sun fights fiercely against showers and clouds. Soon the sky clears, as if running along the endless stripes of the rainbow left by the last rain. Franck and I have barely driven thirty minutes from Cortonwood and, as we approach Orgreave, our eyes scan the landscape in search of a trace of mining. “It’s just like Cortonwood, there’s nothing left, really,” I sigh to Franck.
We’re tired from all these detours we impose on ourselves, failing to find any memorial that echoes the mines, the strikes, or the police violence. Se we pull over near a housing estate with brand-new homes, too straight and too clean to feel real. Outside in the car, things become clearer. Orgreave, more than a site of brutal clashes, has become a showroom for real estate developers. One project, renamed Waverley by white-collar professionals, perhaps betrays the anxiety felt in the face of their own ambitions-to waver, in English, means “to falter.”
I leave Franck behind under the postcard sky. Alone, I slowly climb one of the dirt paths along the edge of the estate, now lined with modern buildings that have replaced the old mining infrastructure. Set among the green hills of this softened England, the water bodies are as still dark as oil stains on beige pants.
My gaze sweeps over the wild wheat growing here and there. The land wears a generous golden mane, its tips dancing in the wind. Higher up, in rainbow country, greylag geese fly south in a perfect V, one only they know how to draw. Children run along the path, followed by parents and dogs.
The landscape is pastoral, and no one would guess that just a few decades ago, coal scarred this idyllic setting with a mining cacophony. Even after all my research, even as I scan every curve of the horizon, I struggle to read the history that once shook this tiny place.
To gain some height, I climb a hill where Franck and I had hoped to find a memorial earlier. As its summit stands a massive stone block, roughly carved into likeness of a miner wearing his helmet, sculpted by one Andrew Vickers. A plaque explains that the monument is dedicated to the workers of Orgreave mine, open from 1851 to 1981. Next to it, a pile of sandwich bread slices, left behind by walkers, slowly goes stale in the open air.
“This is what remains of Orgreave, its coal, its men, and its battles,” I murmur aloud, making sure I’m not dreaming. Before me, the large construction site of the Waverley housing project continues its march: 3,000 eco-friendly homes rising beneath a tsunami of rooftops, or under a tide of slate, I can’t decide which metaphor fits best. Further on stretch commercial and industrial zones. Recognizable names now reside here: Boeing, Rolls-Royce, the University of Sheffield, and even a Marriott hotel. Just like Cortonwood, grand modern projects swallow the memory of one of the most violent confrontations in British industrial history. Once again, a dishonorable way to silence past mistakes.
While Orgreave’s mine closed its last pit in 1981, the adjoining coking plant remained in operation. It specialized in converting coal into coke, a key material for the high-temperature furnaces used in the region’s steelworks, via a sophisticated process of pyrolysis. In archival photos of the site, massive chimneys rise from a tangle of pipes, ducts, and tubes, exhaling thick, dark fumes like weary old smokers.
In 1984, the strike breaks out. Arthur Scargill, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), suggests that blocking the Orgreave coking plant could turn the tide in the union’s negotiations with Thatcher’s government. In other words, without coke to feed the steel industry’s furnaces, the economy would face involuntary shutdowns and a sudden slowdown.
On May 22 of that year, pickets begin blocking the plant’s entrance. Protesters are methodical. They arrive in vans, stay camped out at the site for several days, and rotate shifts with the miners from all over the country. The police respond. Fearing chaos, the government calls for order and firmness. Security checks become stricter, and relations between protesters and officers deteriorate.
A month later, on June 18 at 8:10 a.m, the air grows tense. According to reports, that morning dawns unusually hot. In photos, 8,000 protesters are seen gathered to form what would become the most violent picket in Orgreave’s history. That morning, 35 lorries are scheduled to transport coke to nearby steelworks. Protesters intend to block the convoy.
In front of them, 6,000 officers line up in tight formations. Equipped with riot shields, batons, horses, and dogs, they are reinforced by “snatch squads”, special units trained to arrest “the most aggressive” strikers during violent protests.
At 8:20 a.m, the first assault begins. The police advance behind their wall of shields. Facing them, barehanded miners armed only with their voices and beliefs, disillusioned workers, fathers, sons of the mines, wearing nothing but T-shirts and shorts, eyes blazing with anger at injustice.
Then the first stones fall, thrown behind the crowd. A man shouts, “Stop throwing stones, they fall back on our side only to enrage the police.” In gatherings like these, a few desperate agitators choose action over words. In response, the beatings begin. First drops of blood soak the ground.
Fifteen minutes later, at 8:35 a.m, the police make their move. The snatch squads charge. The fight become brutal. Panic spreads like wildfire. Screams and cries of terror echo. Men, panicked, run in all directions, eyes empty, mouth bloodied, as if they had already lost all hope.
Thatcher’s government seizes the moment to present its strength, paternalism, and authoritarian resolve. It spares no effort to crush the unions, left bleeding in the face of gratuitous violence.
Strikers are dragged by the hair, beaten, kicked. Behind their uniforms, the officers become savage beasts, for whom death is worth no more than life. Horses rear and trample the helpless crowd. No one can resist this military-grade force, deployed as if to a battlefield ravaged by hate.
Fleeing in terror, the miners retreat toward Orgreave village. The police pursue them for hours in a grim game of cat and mouse. In the end, 120 people, miners and officers, are injured. 95 miners are arrested. 55 are charged with “riot”, a crime punishable by life imprisonment at the time. The other 40 face “unlawful assembly” charges and are fined. No investigation is launched into the police conduct. No officer faces disciplinary or criminal charges.
National media side with the police, portraying them as victims. The strikers, we are told, started the fight, leaving officers with no choice but to defend themselves. A police officer name P.C. Martin is filmed on national TV beating a defenseless miner with his truncheon. Two days later, watched by thousands, he defends his violence: “My superiors encouraged such actions.”
Later, officers involved in the clashes speak out. Like P.C. Martin, they admit to being pressured by their superiors to paint union actions as criminal. Some even confess they were urged to submit false statements.
In 1991, South Yorkshire Police is ordered to pay £425,000 in damages to 39 miners for assault, wrongful arrest, and malicious prosecution. The police categorically deny any wrongdoing.
I struggle to put into words the fatigue I feel toward a history that keeps repeating itself. Governments always seem to show the same contempt for ordinary people who don’t fit into their agendas. To this day, too many miners have lost the trust they once placed in law enforcement, and, by extension, in their own government. Among those who remember, many suffer from physical and psychological scars. Yesterday it was the miners; today, it’s countless other marginalized and strigmatized classes. Caught in an endless cycle, we, the so-called citizens of modern democracies, look like the dunces of a history that never learns from its past.
I regret that important places like Cortonwood and Orgreave have buried their past beneath a shopping center in one case, and a housing estate in the other. Yes, the fate of the mines was sealed. When the coal seams dry up, miners can’t just conjure up new reserves like a magician pulling a dove from his hat. Today, coal is long gone from British homes. Radiators have replaced stoves. Cortonwood has turned into a retail park; Orgreave has become Waverley.
But what I take from the violence of Orgreave is how a government showed utter disregard for a whole section of its population, snuffing out a rebellion rooted in a deep sense of abandonment. That rebellion, made up of resigned men and women, grew out of honest citizens. They paid their taxes, covered their bills, did their best to raise their children, and went to the polls when called. By what right was their very existence trampled? To bury such degrading events in forgetfulness is to ensure an inevitable loss. To let ourselves be blinded by projects with no regard for the past is to take another step toward the sterilization of our thinking. Our convictions, our stories, our cultures walk in such lockstep that we forget who we are and where we came from. So I ask myself: will this sad phenomenon eventually strip us of our freedom to act and to think?
When Franck catches up with me, my thoughts are in turmoil. We look for a flat spot to set up camp. Before the entire site turns into just another neighbourhood, we figure spending one night on this land, so rich in memory(ies), is a beautiful way to remember.
Each industrial-sized mine has a headstock, an iconic piece of the coal industry. Photo: Franck Le Quellec. 
A former miner captured during a museum visit. Photo: Franck Le Quellec. 
To celebrate the memory of the miners of Orgreave, the sculpture by Andrew Vickers overlooks the subdivisions under construction of the Waverley project. Photo: Franck Le Quellec.
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Memories of Coal
This post is an excerpt from a long investigative work that gives rise, in 2025, to the publication of a written and photographed report: Memories of Coal.
Franck and Simon launched a crowdfunding campaign to support the printing costs of this 188-page report, written in French and English.
Support them by participating in the campaign ↗︎.
