Queen’s University Belfast and Twentieth Century Society (C20) Awarded a Collaborative Project Grant

Queen’s University Belfast and Twentieth Century Society (C20) were awarded a Collaborative Project Grant for the project Miners’ Modernism: Mapping the Social Impact and Legacy of Pithead Baths. Below Gary A. Boyd (Queen’s University Belfast) outlines more:

Described in 1939 by critic Anthony Bertram as “a colossal social experiment taking architectural form”, pithead baths – which allowed coal miners to wash at work before returning home – were a pioneering, progressive welfare programme that predated the creation of the National Health Service by more than two decades. Yet their legacy is virtually unknown and the potential heritage value of surviving examples remains underexplored.

From 1926 until the early 1960s, the team of architects at the Miners’ Welfare Committee/Commission (MWC) designed and built more than eight hundred pithead baths in coalfields across the country. These facilities were funded by a democratic redistribution of wealth and allocated according to need by national, regional and district committees consisting of miners, colliery owners and government representatives.

At their height, pithead baths served more than a half a million workers, with the lives and health of many more women and children simultaneously transformed by the benefits these buildings brought to their domestic circumstances. Their architecture combined new international thinking on the social, scientific and medical benefits of bathing, leading to the development of industrial baths, within a new iterative European modernist language. Particular inspiration was drawn from the Dutch architecture of Willem Marinus Dudok (1884–1974), and his “brick cathedral”, Hilversum Town Hall, was highly influential in terms of materiality and massing.

However, pithead baths have received scant recognition within architectural and social history. What research has been carried out has focused on past achievements, with almost no attention paid to the programme’s remaining residues, its international influence and its significant contribution to public health across the United Kingdom.

Through a series of targeted and public events and activities across the UK, this collaborative project between Queen’s University Belfast (Gary A. Boyd) and C20 aimed to raise public awareness and knowledge of the pithead baths programme and, through the development of a new publicly inputted digital archival map, ascertain exactly how many of these groundbreaking buildings remain across the country, in what state of repair and what potential there may be for future restoration or rehabilitation.