Urban trauma in the ruins of industrial culture: Miners’ Welfares of the Nottinghamshire coalfield, UK

Abstract

The focus of this paper is bodily-material dynamics of urban trauma in ruins of Miners' Welfare institutions in the Nottinghamshire coalfield, UK. Emergent geographical work on urban trauma has explored how attritional 'slow' violence enacts in space and time, emphasising the complexities of spatiotemporal processes of collective trauma. Processual theorisations in urban trauma literature are prefigured by those in recent ruins research where there is a retheorisation from ruin as object to ruins contingent of spatiotemporal processes of ruination. Bringing recent literatures on urban trauma into closer dialogue with ruins research, this paper makes a methodological contribution to bodily-material dynamics of urban trauma in spaces of ruination. Contributing to theoretical and empirical debates on industrial ruins and ruination, I advance two interrelated methodological positions: archival research and critically reflexive embodied ethnographies. Following a tracing of their development, I situate Miners' Welfares within theorisations of urban trauma and ruin(ation) before proposing a pluralistic and processual methodological framework. The utility of this framework is then enhanced by an empirical section arguing that bodily-material dynamics suggest moments of 'fast violence' imbricate the slow violence of ruination to constitute how urban trauma is textured into, and evoked by, the decline of Miners' Welfares. Le traumatisme urbain dans les ruines de la tradition industrielle: la Société de Secours Minière (Miners' Welfare) du bassin houiller du Nottinghamshire, au Royaume-Uni RÉSUMÉ Cette communication s'intéresse particulièrement aux dynamiques corporelles et matérielles du traumatisme urbain dans les ruines des institutions de la Société de Secours Minière du bassin houiller du Nottinghamshire, au Royaume-Uni. La recherche émergente sur le traumatisme urbain dans le domaine de la géographie a exploré la manière dont la violence d'attrition « lente » joue dans le temps et l'espace, mettant l'accent sur les complexités des processus spatiotemporels au niveau du traumatisme collectif. Les stratégies de ARTICLE HISTORY

The shadow of the Pithead: Understanding social and political attitudes in former coal mining communities in the UK

“…There are a number of potential explanations here. With the deep coalmines almost universally closed by 1990 across the UK, it has been over thirty years since large numbers of people 'went on shift' underground 13 , and this is plenty of time for such relationships and networks to atrophy in the same way as many miners' halls, theatres and libraries fell into disrepair (Emery, 2020). A second alternative is that the levels of distinctive social cohesion and communitarian outlook simply never existed to the extent celebrated by media, politicians and residents themselves -or such characteristics had been in long term decline along with levels of employment in the pits themselves, since the great community project of the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries.…”

Territorial stigmatisation beyond the city: Habitus, affordances and landscapes of industrial ruination

“…The trajectory of the Valleys supports the notion of the fragmentation of wage labour as a 'master trend' (Wacquant 2019), but it also shows how these traumas are written into the landscape and built environment and impinge upon subsequent generations (Emery, 2020b;Mah, 2012). We have made the case for more attention to the integration of the physical and material in understanding these shifts.…”

“…The case of the Valleys therefore addresses a key gap in the existing territorial stigmatisation literature in terms of the relative absence of non-urban, peripheral landscapes of 'industrial ruination' (see Emery, 2019Emery, , 2020b. The focus on the Welsh Valleys is particularly enlightening where the raison d'etre for the establishment of many 'pit village' communities was the extraction of coal with social life and organisation built around the industry and a local 'parallel institutionalism' (Parry, 2003;Wacquant, 2004aWacquant, , 2008b.…”

“…These behavioural strategies are inherited through social mediation, in which the community or social environment teaches its members what to do or what to attend to. This is why the function of the structure is maintained within and between generations (Heras-Escribano and De Pinedo-Garcia, 2018: 11) The 'social functions of those structures' in the Valleys became obsolete and dilapidated in some cases, symbolised in the industrial ruination of the miners' welfare halls (Emery, 2020b). The 'behavioural strategies that help us deal with them' are disrupted by the shock of rapid deindustrialisation meaning an ill-equipped habitus that moves slower than changes in social conditions tending towards emotional problems that manifest as nostalgia, shame and trauma.…”

“…This allows for the integration of intergenerational shifts in habitus, which represent a sociological break in generations (Abrams, 1982). The concept of lagged habitus therefore provides a valuable contribution to recent research on UK coalfields, which has concentrated on affect, loss and trauma in describing the emotional implications of industrial ruination for subsequent generations (Bright, 2016;Mah, 2012;Emery, 2019Emery, , 2020aEmery, , 2020b. The notion of a lagged habitus foregrounds collective histories, the possibility of entanglements in affinities of the past, and the potential for dislocation between psychic and social processes tied to symbolic denigration and collective trauma.…”