'Digging Deep' Bid to honour city's coal mining history with memorials

PROJECT is to be launched to mark the 100th anniversary of the closure of the last coal mine in South Bristol - with hopes that at least two commemorative metal statues of miners are placed where the biggest and most important pits were.

- Tristan CORK

The project, called 'Digging Deep' and set up by the Bedminster Coalminers Heritage Group, will also aim to create commemorative markers to honour the 153 - at least - miners killed in accidents and disasters while down in the unforgiving pits below Bedminster, Southville and Ashton.

A crowdfunder has been set up, and the leading local historian expert on the mining heritage of South Bristol, Garry Atterton, will be hosting an event for local people to find out more, later this month.

That event, which is a display and talks on Bedminster Coalminers, will take place at 11.30am and 12.30pm on Saturday, June 21, at St Aldhelm's Church in Chessel Street in Bedminster, which is part of the wider Great Get Together event, across Bristol.

The project will build on research from Garry and current council leader and local councillor Tony Dyer, who are both local to Bedminster and whose ancestors worked down the mines.

The aim is to install one of the metal statues - of the kind that are common in other former coal-mining communities like Pensford and Radstock in Somerset - on the site of the South Liberty Colliery in Ashton Vale, and in Dame Emily Park in Bedminster, which was a park created following the closure and capping off of the Dean Lane pit head.