“When a pit is shut it’s shut for good,” says engineer Bob Matthews who rode the last cage out of Cotgrave colliery in Nottinghamshire in 1993.
He described how he made a last inspection of the shaft before filling it with 6,000 cubic metres of concrete.
“It was a bit sad being the last men out of there but the worst part was when the time came to switch off the fans.
“Everything just fell silent and that’s when I knew it was absolutely dead.”
Cotgrave was a fairly new pit, only sunk in 1964. It had millions of tonnes in reserves but the coal was not of the highest quality.
A street in the mining community featured earlier around the time of the strike in 1984 with the spoil heap in the distance