The 1984 Miners’ Strike: Sheffield, Orgreave, and What Was Lost

Sheffield was the headquarters of the National Union of Mineworkers under Arthur Scargill, whose Sheffield background was central to his identity and his politics. The NUM offices on Holly Street were the operational centre of the national strike, which began in March 1984 when the National Coal Board announced the closure of twenty pits with the loss of twenty thousand jobs. Scargill believed – and argued consistently, before and after the strike – that the closures were part of a deliberate strategy to break the union and reshape the British economy away from heavy industry and organised labour. The subsequent history strongly suggests he was right about the strategy, even where his tactics remain debated.

The South Yorkshire coalfield – Barnsley, Rotherham, the pit villages of the Don Valley – provided the human geography of the strike. These were communities built around single industries where three or four generations of the same family had worked underground. The strike was not, for these places, an industrial dispute in the conventional sense. It was an existential fight about whether the community would survive. The women’s support groups that emerged during the year-long strike – feeding families, running kitchens, fundraising nationally and internationally – were among the most significant grassroots organisations in British labour history.

The Battle of Orgreave was the violent climax of the picketing strategy. Miners from across the country converged on the coking plant in an attempt to prevent coke deliveries to steel works. The police operation was on a scale never previously deployed against an industrial dispute in peacetime Britain. Horses charged into crowds. Officers used batons. Ninety-five miners were arrested on charges of riot and unlawful assembly. All charges were eventually dropped after it became apparent that police statements had been fabricated and evidence manufactured – a pattern that would be seen again in the South Yorkshire Police handling of Hillsborough five years later.

The campaign for an Orgreave truth and justice inquiry has been running for decades. The Home Secretary in 2016 declined to order a public inquiry. The decision was met with anger from the communities affected and from the many people who believe that the full story of state power deployed against working people in South Yorkshire in the 1980s requires official examination rather than continued official silence.

The strike ended in defeat in March 1985. The pit closures proceeded. By the mid-1990s, the South Yorkshire coalfield was largely gone. The communities that had built their economic and social lives around it faced unemployment, health crises, and a loss of the collective identity that the pit had anchored. The effects were not short-term. The health and life expectancy statistics in former mining communities in South Yorkshire remain significantly worse than national averages forty years later. The community centres, working men’s clubs, and sports facilities built by the mining industry declined alongside the industry that funded them.

Sheffield itself, as a city rather than a coalfield community, had a complicated relationship with the strike. The steel industry – which was going through its own post-industrial collapse simultaneously – overlapped with the mining communities in identity and politics without being identical. The city’s left-wing council, led by David Blunkett, declared Sheffield a “nuclear free zone” and resisted various Thatcher government policies during the same period. The politics of the strike were the politics of Sheffield in the 1980s, and the scar of its defeat runs through the city’s political culture in ways that are still visible today.