“…Three of the villages were built in the last decade of the nineteenth century in established agricultural settlements as colliery 'model villages' under the influence of the burgeoning Garden City movement. Though subject to the steady changes occurring throughout the British coalfields in the 1950s (see Dennis et al, 1956;Lockwood, 1966;Waddington et al, 1991;Warwick & Littlejohn, 1992), they nevertheless exemplified for around a hundred years the 'ideal type' of the traditional mining community recognised by Bulmer (1975), their 'ideology of virility' and their traditional 'geography of gender relations' (Massey, 1994, p. 181) solidly intact. By the turn of the millennium, however, their post-industrial decline -in the memorable phrase of a local youth worker, 'from model village to brown [heroin] city' -had become catastrophic, epitomising the multilayered deprivation that followed on from rapid pit closures.…”