Please choose your preferred introductory paragraph as appropriate.
1) As an educated member of society, you don't need me to remind you about the Kent Coalfield.
2) The UK's former mining industry, as is commonly known, spread far beyond simply Wales and 'The North'. Coal was discovered in southeast Kent in the 1880s and four collieries opened in a rural hinterland behind Dover and Deal. The pits at Betteshanger, Chislet, Snowdown and Tilmanstone were often flashpoints during the Miners Strike and were of course closed down before their centenary year.
3) When you think of mining you don't normally think of Kent, but the Garden of England has been aglow with black gold ever since Victorian navvies hit a seam of coal while digging the prototype Channel Tunnel. Further test boreholes eventually drew thousands of miners from all over the world to this unassuming corner of the country, unnerving the locals and now generally forgotten.
4) Nobody's ever heard of the secret coalmines of Kent. Yes you heard me right, whoever knew they existed, wow it's almost too much to take in.
There are mining museums across the country, the finest at Blaenafon and in West Yorkshire. But there's never been a dedicated Kentmining museum, only a few glass cases in Dover, an omission which was finally put right inApril with the opening of the Kent Mining Museum.
It's at Betteshanger Park, formerly part of Betteshanger colliery, which has been opened up as a recreational plaything for the populace of East Kent. One entrance is half an hour's hike out of Deal, and free, but most people drive so arrive on the far side by car and have to pay for parking. The park covers 365 acres so is enormous, but that's the scale of colliery spoil heaps for you. It originally opened in 2007 as Fowlmead Country Park, which is perhaps not the best name for a former brownfield site, and switched to its more upbeat title in 2018.
They've done a good job of disguising the underlying shale waste, creating a layer of topsoil and planting it with over 100,000 shrubs and trees. The resulting contours are occasionally impenetrable but make for an excellent mountain bike course which threads all over the site with trails for all levels of difficulty. A separate two mile tarmac road circuit allows for time trial action, or more likely as somewhere to tire out young kids on unthreatening roads.
In the centre of the park it's made very clear that the cyclist is king and walkers should stick to a handful of safer paths. They call this young forest Colliers Wood, not in memory of the south London district but because 'Colliers' is the default option for naming anything to do with mining heritage. Elsewhere is a gorgeous blue lake, currently shimmering with dragonflies, and a reedy depression that's normally a pond but has totally dried up in the face of near-drought conditions.
Maps are readily available but occasionally unhelpfully incorrect. I failed to find the Viewing Platform because it's not quite where the map says it is, so missed out on an elevated panorama across golden fields towards Ramsgate and the sea. Also the map by the southern gate has a big black 'You Are Here' blob in completely the wrong location, indeed not on any path at all, and it takes skill to be quite that cartographically incompetent. Given that most visitors probably don't get more than half a mile from the car park, it won't have inconvenienced many.
Other attractions include a hillside assault course made from tyres, ropes and crawl nets, in a fenced-off zone labelled 'Military Fun For Everyone', which feels a very Kentish sales pitch. The Fossil Zone nextdoor looked quite exciting but turned out to be a few picnic tables covered with smashed black rocks and five information boards about dinosaurs, and I still don't know what the point of it was. Perhaps it's no surprise that the busiest part of the site was in and around the Visitor Centre, which is of course where the cafe is and the new Kent Mining Museum too.
A kindly ex-miner guards the entrance, but only to smile, take donations and hand out activity sheets to kids who'd otherwise be quite bored within. Adults merely need to be nudged to look up the see the chandelier of mining tools and reminded to go through the swing door at some point else they'll miss the whole of downstairs. The story is well told across a number of social, technical and geological displays. Expect more words and pictures than actual stuff, but you will find helmets, trucks and a lot of 1980s Coal Not Dole paraphernalia. Kent miners were generally more militant than their northern counterparts, indeed Betteshanger holds the dubious reputation of being the only colliery to go on strike during WW2.
After the single upstairs room it's time for the single downstairs room which is designed to hold temporary themed exhibitions. The first focuses on the broad spectrum of locations Kent's miners arrived from, there being no local pithead workforce when the collieries first opened, and explains why the population in some parts of the coalfield still exhibit hybrid northern accents. It all feels a bit thin, to be honest, with some near-vacuous display cases and an all-too-short projected video, but it gets across the central message well and is a half-decent first attempt.
What's missing at the museum is any kind of leftover colliery building, and for good reason which is that Betteshanger Park only covers the spoil heap and the actual mine was a mile further inland. You can visit the site by following a road that used to be a mineral railway, half of which is car park access and the other half used mostly by learner drivers and truck drivers enjoying a stopover. Alas pretty much everything on the colliery site was demolished other than an office block since requisitioned for small business use, so it's more a rewilded waste than anything to make a pilgrimage to.
Alongside is an isolated loop of cheap semis built for mineworkers - still predominantly working class and totally out of place in the Kent countryside. But they could soon have upmarket company because it turns out the colliery site has been bought by a development company called Quinn Estates who want to fit 210 luxury homes into its footprint, plus a spa and massive 'wave garden' for surfers up at Betteshanger Park. Boss Mark Quinn is a big Tory donor and managed to get Housing Minister Robert Jenrick to overrule local planning inspectors at one of his other Kent-based projects, so isn't particularlypopular locally.
Please choose your preferred concluding sentence as appropriate.
A) Good luck to him, the more of Kent that's built over the quicker the housing crisis will be solved.
B) It would be depressingly ironic if a former militant colliery ended up a wheelerdealer's ticket to a fortune, so let's hope the greedy bastard trips up and leaves Betteshanger to the cyclists, the ex-miners and the wildlife.
