Scotland has 10% of Europe’s coal, according to a recent article in the Guardian, and much of it lies on the banks of the Forth. The Fife coalfield is one of the richest in Europe, and was first mined by the monks of Culross five hundred years ago. Hector Boece, the chronicler of medieval Scotland, wrote – “In Fife are won black stones which have such intolerable heat when kindled that they resolve and melt iron and are therefore right profitable for the work of smiths.” The sparkling black mineral remains right profitable today, although there aren’t any deep mines left – only massive opencasts which delve down into the depths. Scottish Coal owns many of these workings, and also inherited the last of the country’s deep mines.
During an era when the great pits of Lanarkshire, South Wales and Nottinghamshire were being run down and closed, a brand new deep mine was sunk near Kincardine-on-Forth by the National Coal Board (NCB). Paradoxically, the development of Castlebridge Colliery, not far from Culross, foreshadowed the end of deep coal mining in Scotland. But firstly – some context. In 1947, the NCB took over many privately-owned collieries, including two hugely successful companies based in Fife – the Wemyss Coal Co., and the Fife Coal Co. The Scottish coal industry was split east-west: in Lanarkshire, many pits were nearing the end of their lives, but in Fife there was still great promise from untapped seams. The NCB Scottish Division’s chief architect in the post-war era was Egon Riss, an emigre from Austria who built at several pits in the Silesian coalfield, and also designed the Lainz Sanatorium in Vienna. When he escaped from the shadow of fascism in the 1930’s, he also exported the Modern Movement ethos, and he took charge of the development of several former Fife Coal Company schemes including new “superpits” at Rothes and Seafield. Riss’s trademark was to become the concrete-and-glass winding tower, which loomed over pitheads and the surrounding communities in Ayrshire, Fife, and the Lothians. The most striking were the enormous twin towers at the pithead of Seafield Colliery in Kirkcaldy.
I have powerful memories of a childhood visit to Kirkcaldy on a summer evening – whilst the flashing lights, ferris wheels and fairground barkers at the Links Market drew the gaze of most bairns, I was captivated by those twin towers. They sat on the shore beyond Linkstown, and the eye came to rest on them as it followed the curve of the bay. Each tower was over 200 feet high, a sheer wall of patent glazing set into a concrete shaft: the glass sparkled in the sunset, and inside could be made out what I later learned were the silhouettes of the “Koepe” winders. It was explained that the miners travelled in steel cages down shafts almost half a mile deep, then took trains several miles out under the River Forth to win coal. All this left a powerful impression of coal mining – yet not of grimy black miners, silicosis and great hardships underground – but instead, of heroic architecture. That impression remains – and footage from the Miners’ Strike, exactly 25 years ago, has reinforced it. Clips on television show that many collieries were haphazardly-planned collections of conveyors, towers and sheds, often from many different eras, built in an assortment of materials, but rarely according to any kind of masterplan. NCB Scotland’s development schemes were the converse of that. However, by the time Egon Riss died, the era of mass reconstruction had also passed.
Seafield’s towers were flattened not long after the colliery closed in 1988, and mean little people-boxes were built on the site – but recently I saw their spiritual successor, the colliery at Castlebridge, near Kincardine on Forth. As the 1960’s progressed, far more pits were closed than were opened, and NCB Scotland’s Longannet project (which was to include Castlebridge) was also to be one of their last. Longannet was a brand new “superpit”, created to feed Longannet Power Station, which was the largest in Europe at that time (with 2400 MW of generation installed). The Upper Hirst coal was won in the so-called Cable Belt mine which had an underground conveyor several kilometres long to transfer coal from the face to the Longannet adit. Castlebridge was sunk to extend Longannet’s reach: it began producing coal in 1984, and closed in 1999, when the readily-accessible reserves were used up. The Longannet complex as a whole continued in production for three further years once Castlebridge shut, eventually closing in 2002 after flooding. In between, Castlebridge employed 1200 men at its peak, and around 90% of them worked underground. The complex was among Europe’s most productive, and both Castlebridge and the neighbouring Solsgirth repeatedly broke productivity records. However, in contrast to Riss’s brand of Modernism, which owed something to Italian Futurism, his successors were satisfied with functional metal cladding at Castlebridge, rather than dramatic walls of glass. The colliery is carefully screened by a plantation of conifers, and the mechanics of the headstock are hidden in a big grey cube which peeps up above the treeline. Outwardly, the pithead buildings are plain, with brick cladding to dado height and metal eaves. It appears to be business park architecture, lacking the expressionistic qualities that earlier coal mines embodied.
In fact, Castlebridge makes an interesting comparison with other collieries developed during the NCB era: the listed Clipstone in Nottinghamshire, which local residents are nonetheless determined to see wiped off the map; the mothballed Harworth, with its castellated concrete towers buttressed with conveyor belts. They mark stages in the development of pithead architecture: from the spinning wheels of old-fashioned steel pit headgear, to the balanced “Koepe” winders at Clipstone with their engine house at low level, to high level winders enclosed in towers, as at Seafield and then Castlebridge. Where the 1940’s Clipstone was heavily influenced by the Zeche Zollverein complex built in 1920’s Rührland by Schupp & Kremmer, the Fife Coal Co. looked to the Bismarck colliery for inspiration in developing their showpiece mine at Comrie in the late 1930’s. Later, Egon Riss was able to draw on his own experience of Continental practice during his 1950’s schemes at Seafield, Killoch, Rothes and Monktonhall. By the 1960’s, the Rühr coalfield was declining just as steeply as those in Belgium, South Wales and Lanarkshire: there was widespread acknowledgement that King Coal’s time was coming to an end, so there was little need to dress him up in celebratory architecture. In other ways, Longannet, developed late in the 1970’s, was the culmination of coalmining architecture. Castlebridge’s closest parallel is perhaps the Selby Complex, which fed Drax Power Station just as Longannet fed its eponymous generating station. Selby’s architecture is even more anonymous than Castlebridge’s, with a series of most un-mine-like headstocks contained in plain metal boxes.
It’s only when you approach the surface buildings at Castlebridge, and walk into the giant portal under the winder that you realise the scale of the architecture. Concrete shear walls rise up over 60 metres, and the steel armature in which the miner’s cage ran, with 56 men at a time, disappears up into the darkness. It no longer travels downwards, because the 426 metre deep shaft was filled and capped after Castlebridge was worked out. The great cube which sits on top of the winding tower contains winding wheels and a control cabin on the “Bump Floor”. Today enough light leaks in to give the machinery a strange glow: it illuminates the primary colours which engineers like to paint mechanical plant in. The leap of faith comes when you realise you’re over 40 metres up, suspended over the ground on a heavily-reinforced concrete slab which once absorbed the dynamic loads of hauling and braking. There are sound, pragmatic reasons why Castlebridge differs from the earlier mines: not least the widely-reported problems which some Riss winding towers suffered from. As James Stirling discovered, patent glazing can be a leaky system; coal dust has an irresistible attraction to glass, so you end up with a grimy twilight rather than a palace of light.
Above the Bump Floor is the Winding Floor, with a giant blue electric motor, and big friction winding drum. Built by GEC at Rugby in 1980, the circular cladding around the 935kW winding motor looks exactly like that around a turbine – in fact, the same expression as the high pressure steam turbines at nearby Longannet Power Station, only (just slightly) smaller. This marked a paradigm shift from the 1950’s, when Scottish mining equipment companies like Fullertons were so busy that the NCB had to look abroad to fulfill orders: for example, Seafield’s upcast and downcast winders were supplied by Asea of Sweden. That earlier era saw massive investment: just as the Fife Coal Company built a model colliery at Comrie, which was completed at the outbreak of war in 1939; and had begun preparatory work for the superpit at Rothes – the NCB followed up with reconstructions at Frances and Michael, the latter being the Wemyss Coal Company’s jewel, which was Scotland’s (and one of Europe’s) largest collieries, employing almost 3500 men in the 1950’s, and eventually being linked up underground with other mines. The superlatives are necessary to emphasise just how important Fife’s mining industry was, employing 25,000 men, with Scotland’s biggest mines, and most forward-thinking coal companies. Coal was once a native Scots industry – Anderson Strathclyde built the coal-cutting machines, Howdens made giant ventilation fans, Nobels at Ardeer produced explosives, Blantyre Engineering fabricated coal washers, and Fullertons of Paisley manufactured electric winding engines. However, by the time Castlebridge was midway through its production life, it was the last of its kind.
Context at Castlebridge is a much trickier concept than in an urban setting: the colliery sits in an industrial landscape, and its context spreads along both banks of the Forth, following the hidden black seam. Nearby lie the first Kincardine Bridge, a concrete-trussed swing span of 1936; the 1970’s Longannet power station, and its former neighbour, the 1950’s Kincardine power station; the glowing flares and cat crackers of Grangemouth refinery; the cones of Alloa glass works; the even older salt pans at Kennet; the old paper mill at Kilbagie; and downstream, predating them all, the Carron Ironworks, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and a cause of wonder to 18th Century travellers, including Robert Burns. Given this industrial heritage, it’s little wonder that the Kincardine area is one of the world’s oldest industrial landscapes, and that’s as a result of coal.
The NCB’s investment programme at existing mines included welfare facilities for the miners, such as canteens and pithead baths, but because Castlebridge was planned from scratch, these were provided from the start. While the former Castlebridge control room is an empty office today – the equipment has been preserved at the Scottish Mining Museum in Newtongrange – something of the pithead baths remains, but far more substantial are the other spaces which the miners filed through twice each shift. The light-filled stairway that they climbed to reach the steel cage must have seemed like an epiphany when they emerged from the darkness; and the colliery’s vast locker room is still intact. There are countless rows of tall lockers: green for the miners’ “civvies”, and red for their dirty underground gear. Likewise a wall of small lockers, which once held clothes fresh from the pit’s laundry. The stairwells, baths and locker rooms are more generous than the plain elevations allow: with “dimensional” blockwork walls painted white, timber slatted ceilings in the corridors, and exposed concrete waffle slabs in the lockers and stairs, all carried on a substantial concrete frame, square columns with bevelled corners. There is a palpable air of solidity to everything, perhaps because engineering is all in the harsh and unremitting environment of a deep coal mine.
Deep mining may have ended for good at Castlebridge, but it’s a working site – Scottish Coal’s administrative centre and maintenance workshops are still here – so other parts of the complex have been put to differing uses. It’s no surprise, though, to discover that Castlebridge’s boilers have small hoppers into which coal is fed …
With thanks to Scottish Coal for their help. My next piece for the blog will consider the extremes which architecture goes to.
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