Qualla: Daw Mill

Daw Mill: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MaltaGC, CC BY-SA 4.0. At 12:34 on the afternoon of 22 February 2013, smoke began rising from a section of Daw Mill's underground roadway 500 metres below the Warwickshire fields. Within hours the colliery's emergency procedures had brought 92 workers safely back to the surface. None were lost. The fire below, however, could not be put out. It became the worst underground blaze in Britain for thirty years, and what it killed was not the workforce but the mine itself: the last coal mine in a county that had once worked twenty of them, and in 2008 the most productive single coal producer Britain had ever seen.

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Image: MaltaGC | CC BY-SA 4.0

Daw Mill: The Warwickshire Thick

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit G-13114, CC BY-SA 4.0. Daw Mill worked a single seam, five metres of bituminous coal known to geologists as the Warwickshire Thick. The thickness mattered. A face that high meant that mechanised longwall mining could shear out enormous tonnages every week, and the mine's two shafts, sunk between 1956 a...

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Image: G-13114 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Daw Mill: Record-Breaking

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Phil Sangwell from United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0. In 2008, employing 680 people, Daw Mill produced 3.25 million tonnes of coal in a single year. The figure broke a thirteen-year-old British record set at Selby in North Yorkshire, and made Daw Mill the country's biggest coal producer. The achievement was small consolation for a c...

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Image: Phil Sangwell from United Kingdom | CC BY 2.0

Daw Mill: The Fire Below

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Snowmanradio at English Wikipedia. (Original text: snowmanradio), CC BY-SA 3.0. When fire broke out on 22 February 2013, the 92 men working underground evacuated by the planned routes. The blaze, however, was burning in a coal seam itself, and a coal-seam fire is essentially uncontrollable once it has the run of a working face. Smoke filled the workings. Sea...

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Image: The original uploader was Snowmanradio at English Wikipedia. (Original text: snowmanradio) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Daw Mill: Restored to Green Field

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Snowmanradio at English Wikipedia. (Original text: snowmanradio), CC BY-SA 3.0. After the insolvency, the site passed to property developer Harworth Estates, who proposed converting it to a business park with an HGV depot. North Warwickshire residents and councillors objected to the traffic the scheme would generate, and the application was withdrawn in Octo...

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Image: The original uploader was Snowmanradio at English Wikipedia. (Original text: snowmanradio) | CC BY-SA 3.0