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Orgreave Colliery

Coal mines in RotherhamCoal mines in South YorkshireUnderground mines in EnglandUse British English from September 2018
Orgreave Colliery geograph.org.uk 447968
Orgreave Colliery geograph.org.uk 447968

Orgreave Colliery was a coal mine situated adjacent to the main line of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway about 5 miles (8 km) east of Sheffield and 3.5 miles (6 km) south west of Rotherham. The colliery is within the parish of Orgreave, from which it takes its name.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Orgreave Colliery (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Orgreave Colliery
Fox House Lane,

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N 53.37917 ° E -1.36469 °
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Waverley Central Park

Fox House Lane
S60 8AZ , Waverley
England, United Kingdom
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Battle of Orgreave
Battle of Orgreave

The Battle of Orgreave was a violent confrontation on 18 June 1984 between pickets and officers of the South Yorkshire Police (SYP) and other police forces, including the Metropolitan Police, at a British Steel Corporation (BSC) coking plant at Orgreave, in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England. It was a pivotal event in the 1984–1985 UK miners' strike, and one of the most violent clashes in British industrial history.Journalist Alastair Stewart has characterised it as "a defining and ghastly moment" that "changed, forever, the conduct of industrial relations and how this country functions as an economy and as a democracy". Most media reports at the time depicted it as "an act of self-defence by police who had come under attack". In 2015, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) reported that there was "evidence of excessive violence by police officers, a false narrative from police exaggerating violence by miners, perjury by officers giving evidence to prosecute the arrested men, and an apparent cover-up of that perjury by senior officers".Historian Tristram Hunt has described the confrontation as "almost medieval in its choreography ... at various stages a siege, a battle, a chase, a rout and, finally, a brutal example of legalised state violence".71 picketers were charged with riot and 24 with violent disorder. At the time, riot was punishable by life imprisonment. The trials collapsed when the evidence given by the police was deemed "unreliable". Gareth Peirce, who acted as solicitor for some of the pickets, said that the charge of riot had been used "to make a public example of people, as a device to assist in breaking the strike", while Michael Mansfield called it "the worst example of a mass frame-up in this country this century".In June 1991, the SYP paid £425,000 in compensation to 39 miners for assault, wrongful arrest, unlawful detention and malicious prosecution.Following the 2016 inquest verdict into the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, previously censored documents suggesting links between the actions of senior SYP officers at both incidents were published. This led to renewed calls for a public inquiry to be held into the actions of the police at Orgreave.In October 2016, in an Oral Answer to a Question in the House of Commons, a written ministerial statement to the House of Commons and Lords, and in a letter to the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign (OTJC), Home Secretary Amber Rudd announced there would be no statutory inquiry or independent review. In 2016, Alan Billings, the South Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner, admitted that the SYP had been "dangerously close to being used as an instrument of state".Despite the police evidence subsequently being deemed unreliable in court, there still exists a body of opinion that the police at Orgreave "were upholding the law in the face of intimidation from thousands of strikers".

Catcliffe Glass Cone
Catcliffe Glass Cone

The Catcliffe Glass Cone is a glass cone in the village of Catcliffe in South Yorkshire, England. It is the oldest surviving structure of its type in Western Europe, and it is a Grade I listed building and Scheduled Ancient Monument. Only three other glass cones survive in the United Kingdom; at Lemington, Wordsley and Alloa.The glassworks cone was part of the Catcliffe glassworks, which was established in 1740 by William Fenney. Fenney had previously been the manager of the glassworks at Bolsterstone that was owned by his mother-in-law. The site at Catcliffe was chosen in part because the terms of her will prevented him from setting up a glassworks within 10 miles (16 km) of the works at Bolsterstone and Catcliffe is 10.5 miles (16.9 km) away. The glassworks closed c.1887, but was reopened briefly in 1900. The brick cone has archways around the base to allow maximum air entry. It is approximately 20 metres (66 ft) high.Although glassmaking is an ancient process, it was carried out on a small scale until the development of industrialised methods in Europe allowed it to be mass-produced. The fusion of silica and sodium oxide in a furnace was usually achieved by the burning of wood; but coal was often used instead in Britain, which prompted the development of the glass cone. Glass cones consisted of a large central furnace, a flue to carry waste gas to the top of the structure and away, smaller furnaces around the walls to ensure the finished products stayed warm, and a circular platform on which workers stood while making their glassware. Although invented earlier, they became commonplace in the early 19th century; but further innovations in the glassmaking industry made the float glass production method more efficient and allowed manufacture to be based in fewer but larger works. Most cones were knocked down after they fell out of use, and by the mid-1970s only four survived: the Alloa cone (the only example in Scotland), Catcliffe Glass Cone, Lemington Glass Cone in Tyne and Wear, and Red House Cone in Wordsley, West Midlands.In the First World War the site was used as a prisoner-of-war camp and, as a canteen during the 1926 United Kingdom general strike. The cone was threatened with demolition in the 1960s so the foundations of the other buildings that comprised the glassworks were excavated in 1962. In 1968 the cone received Grade I listing.Access to the site was closed in 2006 as bricks were falling from the top of the structure. Restoration work was undertaken in 2014.