United Kingdom Minerals Yearbook 1998

Whatever happened to the UK coal industry? In my part of the world coal mining was once a flourishing industry and the county’s major employer; now it has completely disappeared apart from one or two opencast sites, and the region is still trying to come to terms with the closure in economic, employment and social terms. Presumably it is cheaper to import than to mine our own (although there is still plenty of coal lying underground here), but I have questioned the wisdom of a government putting the country apparently almost entirely into the hands of overseas suppliers of strategic...