If you lived during the early 1980s in the UK, it was frequently marked by news images of men on picket lines and others in dole queues. The Britain that had ‘never had it so good’ of the 1960s was in industrial decline only 20 years later. A central point of that was the closing of the British Coal industry – along with the determination of the miners to keep their jobs for as long as possible.

For centuries miners had represented the backbone of UK output; they were a protected profession throughout two world wars, respected for risking their lives every day – but by the 1980s they were at war with government policy and at odds with the changes happening to British industry in the modern world. Forty years later parts of the UK have still not recovered from the impact of the closures, or the strikes, which sometimes pitted families and communities against each other. To mark those events, we have selected a podcast that provides the backdrop to that time and a context to what was happening as mining communities clung to a way of life that was disappearing.