ABSTRACT
Whilst the South Wales coalfield was once the largest area of coal export in the world and provided the largest source of employment in Wales, it is now typified, according to some, by the ‘post-industrial’ condition: unemployment, loss of place identity, limited social mobility, and increasing political alienation. By disputing the binary of industrial/post-industrial, it is possible to argue that communities should be reconsidered in a way that acknowledges their enduring industrial culture. Using ethnographic research, interview data and auto-ethnographic reflections collected in an ex-coal mining town in a South Wales valley, UK, this chapter seeks to better consider how legacies of industrial heritage can be traced throughout these lives, communities and landscapes. By considering memory as rooted in the material and immaterial; affective, emotive and discursive; shared and imagined, we can reflect on how individuals relate not only to a (post-)industrial town, but also to the many temporal continuities of industrial life and landscape. This chapter troubles linear conceptualisations of deindustrialisation and the ‘post’- industrial town to provide an understanding of how industrial heritage continues to matter, be (re)constructed, and manifest in the everyday lives in these places and landscapes, underpinning the continuation of an industrial heritage that is often unconsidered.
