Drifting back in time

My inspirations for this blog and the forthcoming sabbatical study it introduces, are the housing and many new communities which grew up during the 70s and 80s. This post goes back a little further focusing on a place which was most certainly a 'penny' in the foundations of my life, but which was nearing the end of its existence when I knew it. I write just after tracing my footsteps to that place. If I got my bearings correct, the village was situated on the land to the north (right) of this image. But a lot has happened since I was last there.

The 'proper' name was/is East Chevington, but it was always known as Chevington Drift, after the drift coal mine which was the reason for its existence. My visits to this 'pit village' were usually to the Primitive Methodist Chapel, where dad sometimes preached, mum occasionally played the organ and for a short period where I attended Sunday School.

I was probably 11 or 12 when I last visited but such was the impression it made on me that standing on this country lane on a fresh and sunny winter morning, I could visualise almost every detail, recall the pungent fragrance of air made thick by dozens of coal fires, and breathe in the heady Methodist aroma of damp and furniture polish in the immaculately kept chapel. I could hear the voices with their thick, rolling 'r's of the Northumberland Pitmatic dialect which was almost impenetrable to the untrained ear. The 'village' was built around the turn of the 20th century to house the workers at the 'Drift'. Formed of long straight rows of  small houses built in the yellow brick which characterised so many places that I knew well during my childhood in the towns and villages of the Northumberland coalfield. But the fate of this village was different from others that I knew - it was demolished to make way for open cast coalmining in the late 1970s. The area has now been re-established as farmland and a nature reserve. The population were decanted to new homes a few miles away. The only evidence of its former life is a monument to the miners who lived and died in the Drift - carved on a slab of stone dug out during the opencast excavations. I was intrigued to learn that the mine closed in the year I was born. The life of the village was ebbing away, just as mine was beginning.

This place which no longer exists stirred up memories in a way that other places I have visited so far in this journey through places and buildings which moulded me, have not. Perhaps a reminder that we cannot live in the past, but that the past lives in us? Of course as a child I did not appreciate that I was experiencing the end of something or even that the world around me was being reinvented. I'm glad I went back to find Chevington Drift, it might just prove to be the real beginning of this story about the way the built environment and the formation of communities influenced who I became and am becoming.

Ordnance Survey 1970

Google maps 2022