one of the 10 buildings that helped change Britain<\/a>.<\/p>\nAndrew McIntyre, the interim CEO of Redhills, said it was far more than just a building. \u201cYou\u2019re kind of standing on the spot where the welfare state was first imagined,\u201d he said. \u201cIt has always had an aura \u2026 a magic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Redhills, in Durham city centre, is regarded as one of the finest examples of trade union architecture. Photograph: Christopher Thomond\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
The building has been slowly, quietly reopening since the restoration was completed this year. It decided against a grand reopening event in favour of a softer relaunch but it has not gone unnoticed.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re barely open and all of our guided tours are sold out into next year,\u201d said McIntyre.<\/p>\n
Bill Moir, who will be leading tours, took the Guardian around what is few people\u2019s idea of what a miners\u2019 hall should look like.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was designed like this so that the men of the coalfields, when they came to represent their pits, would enter an entrance hall equally as glorious as the entrance hall of the owners of coalmines,\u201d said Moir. \u201cIt was built on this grand scale to equal anything built by the aristocracy.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Austrian oak chamber where the \u2018pitmen\u2019s parliament\u2019 convened. Photograph: Christopher Thomond\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
The restoration has been long and painstaking but much needed. The Austrian oak chamber where the \u201cpitmen\u2019s parliament\u201d convened looks magnificent today, \u201cbut if you had come here three, four years ago, not only would the smell of mould nearly knocked you out, but the floor was starting to deteriorate, it was just rotten\u201d.<\/p>\n
It was built, said Moir, in the style of a Methodist chapel in the expectation there would be \u201ccollaboration and cooperation\u201d rather than combative discussions.<\/p>\n
It was here that miners discussed ideas of a welfare state, long before this was created in Britain, as well as community infrastructure, models of universal healthcare and levels of fair compensation<\/p>\n
That history drives the new Redhills, said McIntyre.<\/p>\n
Guided tours of the refurbished building are sold out into next year. Photograph: Christopher Thomond\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
The restoration was part-funded by the national lottery but before the bid, Redhills consulted communities. \u201cWe asked people what they wanted the future to be and they were absolutely adamant that it wasn\u2019t a museum and it shouldn\u2019t be a heritage centre. They didn\u2019t want us to build a memorial or a mausoleum to the past.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were arguing that it\u2019s the beating heart of a living culture, not just the brass bands and the banners.\u201d<\/p>\n
There will be weddings, funerals, conferences and concerts at Redhills but the bigger idea is that it becomes a kind of mothership of cooperative endeavour.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are enormously proud of where they\u2019re from, of their heritage, of their family history, of their mining heritage and culture, but what they lack is hope,\u201d said McIntyre.<\/p>\n
The new Redhills wants to replicate what the Durham Miners\u2019 Association was doing 100 years ago when it was creating a kind of working-class commonwealth and building parks, sports grounds, houses for aged mining families and more.<\/p>\n
A photograph on display at Redhills. Photograph: Christopher Thomond\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
The first project is centred around the once prosperous village of Horden in east Durham, a place that already has Ensemble 84, a theatre company led by the acclaimed theatre director Mark Dornford-May and which, earlier this year, staged a new Lee Hall version of Bertolt Brecht\u2019s Mother Courage<\/a>.<\/p>\nMcIntrye says there are opportunities for homes to get cheap heat from mine water, to have the community take control of housing stock and then after that, why not social care?<\/p>\n
\u201cThe council is paying out millions of pounds but they\u2019re paying it to private companies who are skimming off a huge percentage of the budget and just taking that as profit and that\u2019s being shipped out of Durham straight away,\u201d said McIntyre.<\/p>\n
Since the pits closed 40 years ago, people in Durham have waited and waited for governments to come and do things, he said. \u201cHow many elections have we had since the pits started closing? Not many of them seem to have changed much.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Outside the impressively grand, Edwardian baroque building in Durham are two wooden benches, each dedicated to men who…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":352678,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-352677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352677\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}