ABSTRACT
The south Wales' valleys had been at the centre of the Industrial Revolution in the 1920s and so at the cutting edge of skilled practices developed in the mining and steel industries. Men came to these remote and typologically impressive places, settled, created communities, brought up families and passed down their skills. The last working mine closed in 2001, following a tremendous battle of resistance in the 1980s from the highly unionised mining community. The boys in these studies were children of the post-industrial era and this chapter investigates their legacies, implications for the current educational focus on skills and their imagined futures.
