Backbone

Discover captivating photographs by filmmaker and photographer Meloni Poole, documenting the closure and final months of Annesley Bentinck Colliery her father’s pit in 2000, and the lives of the pit men during this closure period.

Following [my father’s] footsteps to the coalface I spent the final months of the pit’s life,  speaking with the men. The portraits are intimate encounters as they contemplate the ending of their lives as miners and what a new life might mean. 

“Annesley Bentinck was the oldest colliery in Britain. The mine where dad worked, like him, died in a new Millennium. Following his death from miner’s lung, I retraced his footsteps to the coalface. Met the men he worked beside. From my first visit to the colliery it was the men’s bodies that fascinated me. The lines on their faces, the hands, the stories they could tell. My childhood memories of dad are brief flickers. Black mascara was always etched around his eyes and in the creases of his big hands a big black pencil had drawn outlines. As a child I did not imagine what the dust did, even though the signs were already there.” – Meloni Poole

Funded by the Arts Council of England, Backbone reimagines the archive photographs and film and commemorates Ashfield’s coal mining heritage. An immersive event will take place at Cornerstone Theatre, Sutton in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire on 24-26 July 2026.

Image credit: ©Meloni Poole, 2025