Round here, it’s just “the strike”. Reference to miners is superfluous. Even four decades later, events of 1984/85 still resonate – and not just among the people who were directly involved at the time.
Artist Narbi Price was in primary school in Hartlepool during the strike. Yet he credits it with forming some of his earliest memories of a world beyond the schoolyard.
“A lot of my early memories were about seeing it on the telly, seeing the unrest and seeing the disruption,” he said. “That cast a kind of spectre, it was reflected in the people around when I was growing up.
“We were seeing those people vilified on TV. Now and we know how that was spun and we know a little more of a more nuanced truth about it. But I think I was aware of that on some level even back then.”
Narbi was speaking at the opening of Going Back Brockens, a large-scale art project that opened last weekend in Bishop Auckland. The exhibition combines 40 of his new paintings, six short films by Carl Joyce, and a series of sound installations derived from Mark Hudson’s 1994 book Coming Back Brockens, a chronicle of a year in Horden as a community lurched from one of the country’s biggest collieries to a town that lost its purpose when the mine closed.
When the idea was first mooted, Narbi admits it was a challenging brief – and it led to his largest single body of work to date.
“When No More Nowt approached me, we were coming up to the 40th anniversary of the strike so it just made sense to do 40 paintings,” he said. “And then it was dealing with County Durham, a hugely diverse set of landscapes. It’s not just one thing.
“That was another challenge for me as a painter. I didn’t want to just paint trees, or just paint buildings or whatever. The size and the scale was quite important to the whole project.”
‘The way you move around the space has changed’
The next step was to explore the sites of the 14 pits that were still operative in Durham at the start of the Miners’ Strike in 1984. Those visits threw up a mixture of images – dereliction, bleak and empty landscapes, but also signs of nature renewing itself.
“When you walk around ex-mining villages a lot of the way you move around the space has changed,” he said. “The way they are set out, it’s around something that isn’t there anymore.
“There’s a different rhythm, a different feeling. The old focal point is gone.”

In 2025, it’s easy to let nostalgia take over. Suddenly, every village green has half a pit wheel set on a plinth, or an oversize miner’s lamp marking the site of the old mineshaft. But these are relatively recent additions, simple memorials that make no effort to explore what really happened.
“Nostalgia and sentimentality go hand in hand,” Narbi added. “But here we have this traumatic event, this generational trauma that happened. Suddenly a lot of the discourse, a lot of the thinking about that, goes back to this huge, sudden kind of death – it’s like an assassination.
“That was very important to that generation of that time, and the generation right afterwards. But we can’t keep going back to that, there are people with no experience of that.
“We have to move on, to transform and look forward. But the spectre of those things is always there. It might be things you’re not consciously aware of, how you move through a space that was shaped by something that isn’t there anymore.
“That’s a kind of mournful act, I think, whether you’re consciously aware of it or not.”
‘It’s who we are, it’s what made us’
One counterpoint comes from Coalfield Studio’s films. Carl Joyce, born and raised in a mining family in Horden, is another creative whose childhood straddled the end of the coal era. His six shorts are based on interviews with different people living in what was once the East Durham coalfield. There are recurring themes: loss and betrayal, not just at the closure of mines but at the on-going failure to replace them; a sense that any future lies away from here.
Brooke, a teenager from Peterlee, admits that she doesn’t want to move far away from home. But, at the same time, she feels that it isn’t the place for her; a town of constricted opportunity with a sense that life is going on somewhere else.
Yet for others there’s also a sense of enduring pride and defiance, a community that, however battered, is determined to survive.
In Easington, Ross Strong recognises the devastating impact that drugs had in a community that lost its purpose with the closure of its colliery. But for all the challenges Easington still faces, pride endures. Pride in heritage, in industry. “That means everything being from Easington,” he said. “It’s who we are, it’s what made us.”
But while Coming Back Brockens offers an unusually nuanced portrait of one of Britain’s most left-behind regions, it cannot provide answers.
And, after 40 years of neglect from governments that have offered indifference at best, hostility at worst, there’s some cynicism that a solution will ever be found. As Narbi concluded: “I don’t know what the answer is. If I did, I’d probably have a job in the government.” A pause. “Or, probably I wouldn’t!”
Going Back Brockens is on display at The Warehouse, Bishop Auckland, until July 5. Then it will feature at Durham Miners’ Gala on July 12 and at St. Mary’s Church, Horden, on July 22.