Coal-miners who worked the Ashington pits in the 1930s started taking evening classes in art appreciation. They listened. Then they began to paint - not landscapes or still lifes but the world they knew. The bait time underground. The pit ponies. The pigeon crees behind the rows. A pneumonia patient in the village. Their work became known as the Ashington Group, and it now hangs permanently at Woodhorn, the museum built into the headframes and engine houses of what used to be Woodhorn Colliery. The pit closed. The men who worked it are mostly gone. The paintings remain.
Woodhorn Colliery's surviving buildings are the most complete late-nineteenth-to-early-twentieth-century colliery group in the north-east of England. The site is a Scheduled Monument. Two headframes still stand over the shafts, the iron lattice towers that once raised and lowered cages of men and coal. A winding house remains intact, complete with a steam winding engine - the engine that turned the great drum that wound the cable that hauled the cages. Other engine houses, the stables that once held pit ponies, the ventilation building, a blacksmith and joiner's shop, the colliery office - all are still standing, mostly with their original equipment in place. The first time the site opened as a museum was in 1989. The original pit buildings were used as galleries. From 2002 to 2006 a substantial redevelopment took place, with architect Tony Kettle overseeing the design. A new building was added that holds the Northumberland County Archives. The museum reopened in October 2006.
In 1934 the Ashington Workers' Educational Association arranged an art appreciation class for local men, taught by Robert Lyon. Within months the students wanted to make their own pictures. They had no formal training. They had eyes, and they had subject matter that no one else in British art had really been painting. They worked at weekends in a hut behind a Methodist hall. They painted what they saw: the cage descending, the long bait time eating sandwiches in the dark, the leek shows, the funerals, the rows of terraced houses, the whippet racing, the allotments. The group lasted nearly fifty years. Their work was exhibited nationally during their lifetime, but for a long time afterwards it was undervalued - working-class art was supposed to be folk art, not gallery art. The reassessment came slowly. Woodhorn now holds a permanent display of the Ashington Group paintings, in the buildings of the colliery where many of the painters earned their daily wage. It is among the most direct museum spaces in Britain: the workplace and the depiction of the workplace, together.
Ashington was once one of the largest coal-mining villages in the world, called the largest mining village in the world at its peak in the 1920s. Woodhorn was one of several deep pits that served it. Across the north-east, in a region that drove the early industrial revolution and powered the railways and the navy, almost every working colliery has gone. The headframes have been cut down, the spoil heaps reseeded, the housing redeveloped. Woodhorn is one of the few sites where you can still walk through the actual buildings that the work was done in, see the actual engines that did it, and see in adjacent galleries the paintings that the workforce made about themselves. The Northumberland County Archives in the new building hold the documentary side of the same history - census records, employment registers, lodge minutes. Together they make a record of a way of life that ended within living memory.
Woodhorn Museum sits at 55.19 degrees north, 1.55 degrees west on the eastern edge of Ashington in south Northumberland. Newcastle International Airport (EGNT) lies approximately sixteen nautical miles south-southwest. From altitude, the two surviving headframes are visible as small dark towers against the reclaimed pit site, with the new museum building's curved roof catching light when the sun is right. The North Sea coast is three nautical miles east at Newbiggin Bay. Visibility is best on westerly or northwesterly flows; coastal haze from the North Sea can hide low industrial features. Look for the Lynemouth power station chimneys to the northeast as a navigation reference.