It was a vast and lavish operation. While roadies were building manufacturers’ elaborate show stands in the 26-acre Palexpo center on the run-up to the event, their PR counterparts were turning the region’s resorts into a multi-week, multi-Alp industry bacchanal. Immediately after the grand opening night, the sector would decamp in its entirety to money-no-object afterparties at chalets, hotels, and rented pleasure craft in the Petit Lac.

Like the rest of Europe’s car industry, it was fun while it lasted. And also like the rest of Europe’s car industry, it “lasted” about a century before the wheels came off. As Covid-19 tore through Europe, the show’s organizers canceled the 2020 edition at the last possible minute. It was a panicked decision that infuriated exhibitors, many of which had spent seven-figure non-refundable sums preparing enormous displays for which the show had become known.

The show disappeared for a few years, returning meekly and to a tepid reception in 2024, but by then European carmaking had begun to change the way it imagined itself. China, Covid-19, Dieselgate, EVs and Net Zero all cast a shadow over the Geneva Motor Show and the fossil-fueled success it represented. Footfall had plummeted from over 600,000 punters pre-pandemic to about a quarter of that at the show’s half-hearted final Swiss installment, which was largely snubbed by even large car brands that couldn’t justify the cost of appearing, and which had been rattled by several years of supply chain issues. An attempt to rebuild the event’s prestige in Doha fell predictably flat and, as the wider industry reckoned with its new, challenging headwinds, the organizational committee moved to dissolve itself, marking the end of one of Europe’s most influential industry showcases. It was simultaneously a regrettable circumstantial fumble and a helpless industrial self-own.

If Geneva’s death reflected a symbolic fracture in Europe’s century-long automotive home run, the rise to prominence of the Brussels Motor Show — a more straightforward, pragmatic and frankly dowdier occasion — reveals its current crisis of self-esteem. Held a little earlier in the year, the Brussels event has pretty much inherited Geneva’s position as Europe’s de facto auto show of note, now hosting the European Car of the Year awards and a smattering of product unveilings, but without any of the glamour. Journalists and dignitaries visiting this year’s rainy press preview day were greeted by buckets, some filling with alarming speed, placed beneath the numerous leaks in the elderly Brussels Expo roof.

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The UK is falling into China's trap

By Luke de Pulford

The rot can, by my reckoning, be traced back to Q3 2011. When I first started writing about vehicles in 2009, the Chinese automotive industry was justifiably disregarded in Europe. Nobody drove an electric car. Only 55 EVs had been sold in Britain that year, compared with around 600 across the rest of the EU. Europe’s entire EV fleet could, at the time, have parked several times over in the car parks of Belgium’s leading exhibition center. But within about 20 months, Nissan had launched the Leaf (arguably the first mainstream EV) and the Chinese state-owned giant SAIC had begun selling the sub-par MG6 sedan, laundered for the British market with the historic MG badge. Both cars were bad in their own ways, but their arrival was the beginning of the end of Europe’s car manufacturing primacy. Fifteen years on, a British family is about as likely to choose a Chinese car as it is a Japanese one, and the country now buys those 55 electric vehicles by about 10am on a given Saturday morning. Some 9.7% of cars sold in Britain, for example, are from Chinese companies, and many more — especially electric models — were built in China on behalf of foreign ones.

My crumpled fold-out floor plan of the Brussels Motor Show charts this phenomenal pace of change. Mitsubishi’s stand is flanked by Chinese newcomers Jaecoo, Omoda and Zeekr, the latter a Geely sub-brand now headquartered in Volvo’s hometown Gothenburg. Opposite them is Xpeng, then Nio, then BYD — a company that only began exporting EVs five years ago, and which is now the world’s largest builder of them. Chinese car manufacturers are unambiguously okay now, having overcome some or most of the consumer skepticism they were met with when they first arrived, and are exploiting their considerable head start in EV manufacturing (which equates to around half a decade, or roughly one model cycle, particularly in battery and powertrain tech) and low production costs, which are estimated to be around a third cheaper than those of the European manufacturers.

This asymmetry is evident even on ostensibly “European” stands. The Spring, a cheap electric runabout sold by Romanian Renault subsidiary Dacia and occupying quite a prominent place on the brand’s display, is built in Hubei province. Smart (originally developed in the Nineties by Mercedes-Benz to sell microcars, which it built in its then-futuristic Smartville factory in Hambach) is now a German-Chinese joint venture that manufactures electric SUVs in Xi’an. Even the electric Mini Cooper, a direct descendent of, arguably, British carmaking’s greatest cultural export, is now built in Zhangjiagang.

Regulators, half an hour away on the Brussels metro, and politicians, 20 minutes away by diplomatic S-Class, have consistently encouraged and rewarded these incursions. They have cajoled consumers towards EVs that only Chinese companies can sustainably sell at anything approaching affordable prices. And the Chinese government, which has created near-chaotic levels of oversupply in its neo-dirigiste car and battery industries, and which has identified global leadership in this critical sector as a strategic ambition, owns companies that are increasingly able to participate directly at the consumer level rather than merely embedding themselves into global supply chains.

To put it politely, this challenges conventional narratives of European automotive supremacy. Longstanding manufacturers from industrial powerhouses like Germany and France — frequently downplayed as “legacy brands” with varyingly scornful undertones — were the best in the world at building petrol and diesel cars. Audi’s Vorsprung durch Technik slogan reflected a national ideology during the internal combustion era, while Renault’s pre-war l’Automobile de France became a macroeconomic truth as its automotive engineering grew integral to its industrial output. Carmakers were relevant to cultural identity as well as GDP, and as tangible representations of homegrown technological prowess, passenger vehicles are perhaps more obvious to a major nation’s population than, say, its arms or chemical products. And to smaller European countries, which entered the car sector late, the mass production of quality consumer vehicles grew to represent an economic ascendancy beyond agriculture, raw materials and whichever less aspirational heavy industry they had been involved with previously. When Škoda Auto was privatised and integrated into Volkswagen in 1991, the confidence signal (and flow of Deutsche Marks) changed the way post-communist Czech manufacturing was perceived both internationally and at home, and the country’s automotive sector is now its industrial flagship and major source of national pride.

Tucked away behind the beefy six-figure EVs at the Brussels show are a smattering of perfectly good, conventional, small-displacement petrol cars, with manual gearboxes and realistic prices. Still in production for the next few years at least, these are living artifacts of an era in which Europeans built their own stuff. China was among the worst at manufacturing this kind of car, never coming close to emulating Europe’s internal combustion engineering, which was of such undisputedly high quality that it deterred new entrants. In the Net Zero era, that polarity has begun to reverse. It’s little surprise that Europe’s routed giants are retreating into nostalgia.

Above the Alpine stand, a vast screen displays, on an endless loop, the brand’s short film entitled 70 Years of Lightness, which imaginatively intersperses live action clips of the French company’s historic models racing on a mountain with stylized Ligne Claire animated sections, redolent of Hergé’s (locally) legendary Tintin cartoons. Mercedes-Benz’s sprawling display includes a replica of the Patent Motor-Wagen, probably the world’s first car, which it claims as its spiritual origin. Lotus has seemingly painted its Evija hypercar in John Player Special livery in a wistful nod to its own self-nominated motorsport heyday. But the retrospection has seeped even into the physical designs of Europe’s current and next-generation models, which increasingly lean on yesteryear’s fondest memories.

On the Renault stand, for example, rehashes of the R5 Turbo (a mid-Eighties “hot hatch” motorsport pinup) and Renault 4 (the first modern hatchback, mechanically speaking, with 8 million sold worldwide over three decades) sit beside the new Twingo, which revives both the nameplate and the cutesy bug-eyed design of the 1992 original. Behind the new but retro-styled Panda on the Fiat stand is the new Trio, which directly apes postwar trikes like the Piaggio Ape that were a cornerstone of Italian transport for half a century. There’s nothing fundamentally new about car manufacturers referring back to their greatest design hits — an ever-present reminder of this is the 2007 Fiat 500, which did for 21st-century Fiat what the original Cinquecento (on which its design is based) did in the nascent post-war economy of Fifties Italy. But short of a pan-European miracolo economico, these reheated people’s cars risk coming across as an expensive pastiche.

Almost all of Europe’s largest mainstream car companies owe their existence in the market — and status as flag-carriers for their home country’s economy — to an affordable mass-market “people’s car” that they sold at some point in the 20th century. Famous examples include the Citroën 2CV, a simple peasant-spec machine originally slated for a 1939 launch, but ultimately released into the wreckage of rural France a decade later; Fiat’s aforementioned 500, designed to fit inside the twisting streets of Italy’s borghi, both symbolized and facilitated the mass mechanization of postwar Italy; and Volkswagen’s Type 1 Beetle, a design so good that it remained in production until 2003, remains the bestselling single product in the industry’s history. Even later models like the Renault Twingo (totemic of Europe’s now-lost belief in compact, inexpensive cars) and Renault Espace (which spawned the “Eurovan” genus of aggressively practical people-carriers that dominated motorways for 20 years) responded neatly to the needs of Europe’s economy and citizens at the time.

It is likely that any modern-day equivalents will be Chinese-developed or Chinese-built using Chinese components or at least Chinese raw materials. Europe’s remaining car industry, underpinned anyway by Chinese supply chains, has been forced to relinquish its century-old relevance to ordinary Europeans — a hard-won privilege deftly undermined over just 15 years. Today, the capacity to deliver affordable cars that Europeans either want or are forced by regulations to need belongs exclusively to foreign manufacturers, predominantly Chinese.

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By Helen Thompson

Volvo belongs to Geely, as does the manufacturer of London’s black cab. German-owned Mini builds its British-flavored EVs in Jiangsu province. Stellantis, headquartered in Hoofddorp, owns formerly patriotic brands like Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Peugeot and Maserati, as well as selling Chinese-made Leapmotor runabouts that substantially undercut most alternatives. The historic giants that once dominated the Geneva Motor Show through superior engineering and cultural cachet have, in the years since the event imploded, either been consumed by Chinese corporate might altogether, or forced to consolidate. The smaller, damper Brussels Motor Show is where the wounded survivors have rallied.

Europe will find it difficult to un-strip the assets of its former industrial keystone. With zero-emission mandates funneling consumers and commercial buyers towards what is effectively an imported technology, it is near-impossible to imagine a solution that meaningfully rectifies the auto sector’s current course. Tariffs have proven ineffective at stymying the influx of Chinese cars, which now enjoy a 12.8% market share. Manufacturers are happy to swallow the additional costs, and Chinese suppliers are beginning to open plants in third countries anyway.

At the last-ever Geneva Motor Show, former Renault boss Luca de Meo called for what would amount to an Airbus-style consortium of pan-European cooperation on affordable electric cars, a further dilution of carmakers’ national identities and still a slightly unconvincing response to China’s heavily subsidized and comprehensively integrated supply chain. There are doubts as to whether Europe could come close to emulating this raw materials advantage, even in favorable regulatory conditions or if a coherent decision was made on reducing reliance on EV imports. In all but the most optimistic of scenarios (which involve the rapid exploitation of local mineral deposits and the development of advanced industry to process them) Europe’s car sector, and by extension the mobility of its population, will be in Chinese hands.

A few years after Winn’s excavations, the first furnaces were built, and the Domesday hamlet of Scunthorpe started producing pig-iron. The borough’s old crest features a blast furnace belching flames, with the redolent motto: “The Heavens Reflect Our Labours.” Soon, the county’s companies started turning the iron into steel. By the end of the First World War, Scunthorpe produced 3% of the UK’s steel, some of it armouring the first military tanks, invented in Lincoln; by the start of the Second, it was producing 10%, some of it used in D-Day landing craft.

Since then, Scunthorpe metal has gone into everything from Sydney Harbour Bridge to the London Eye. But this elemental industry is rusting away. British Steel has recurred in the last decade’s headlines, almost always linked to job losses. Now, up to 800 of its remaining 3,200 steel jobs are at risk — a painful reversal for Lincolnshire.

Scunthorpe’s steel was for many years a magnet, attracting workers from all over Britain, and sometimes overseas — Germans before the Second World War, Eastern Europeans afterwards, Asians in the Seventies. In 1960, almost a third of Scunthonians (around 20,000) were directly employed in steel. A BBC documentary from that year, Scunthorpe is Booming, shows a town of bustling streets, with optimistic interviewees talking about all the things they could buy thanks, directly or indirectly, to steel — cars and foreign holidays and “tellies” — although a few did express reservations about the social effects of all this dynamism. Industries sprang up to cater to steel’s ever-lengthening supply chains, and all these new consumers — including Golden Wonder crisps. (Some locals claim the cheese and onion flavour was invented in the town.)

It was Steve Cook who cast Scunthorpe’s last ingots, in 2000. He started at British Steel in 1968 with just four O-levels, and retired in 2007, having risen to the rank of Quality Manager. Sitting in his immaculate house within earshot of the furnaces, he exudes quiet pride: “Scunthorpe was renowned for making one of the best steels in the world, and the name British Steel was synonymous with quality.” He recalls an avuncular employer, which sponsored his studies in metallurgy, then provided a job for life. The town, he remembers fondly, largely revolved around shift-times, with hooters announcing shift-changes. Streets would fill with men on bicycles and then as suddenly empty again, an almost instinctive mass movement of those who were busily forging the future. Now the town’s commuters, faces fixed to their phones, are living in worlds of their own.

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The nuclear war for Lincolnshire

By Derek Turner

Not everyone enjoyed their time working in Scunthorpe steel. Conditions were hazardous in the early days. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, steelworkers would work 12-hour weekday shifts, and 24-hour shifts on alternate Sundays, with no extra pay even on Christmas Day. Veterans of the Twenties recalled their lunches being layered with fine iron grit. There were frequent accidents: on the worst day, in 1975, 11 workers died when one of the town’s iconic “Four Queens” furnaces blew up. As recently as 2021, a fireball erupted unexpectedly at the British Steel works, although luckily no-one was hurt. Last year, a 27-year-old worker was killed falling from a crane.

And not all the social impacts of the works were positive. Influxes of large numbers of young single men, and the Tartarean thirstiness of their work, resulted in problems with public drunkenness; as early as 1860, extra constables had to be drafted in. Employers took a zero-tolerance approach, with workers liable to be sacked if they had any alcohol on their breath — except for one steelworks, which ran what must have been a highly lucrative “wet canteen” into the Seventies.

A community spirit nevertheless emerged, grounded in shared experience and Methodist morality (nearby Epworth was John Wesley’s birthplace), and reinforced by institutions. Technical colleges and grammar schools, a hospital, a theatre, and an array of social and sporting clubs all began to appear, most famously Scunthorpe United, founded in 1899, and nicknamed “The Iron”. Workers wistfully recall a steely solidarity, with its own vocabulary — casters, feedstocks, gangue, sinter, trunnion — and a confidence borne of mastering dangerous elements for their own and everyone’s benefit. Steelworkers took on an almost mythic quality at times in the popular imagination, brilliantly skilled men silhouetted against incandescent orange, controlling leviathan cranes that swung 130-tonne ladles filled with 280 more tonnes of molten menace. Today’s call-centres, industrial parks, and offices are pallid by comparison.

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By Ian Birrell

When British Steel was born, in 1967, as the British Steel Corporation (BSC), there was much excitement about “the white heat of technology”. Innovations would, it was argued, remould the tired old post-imperial country. BSC emphasised quality over quantity, investing constantly in technical research. Britain had always been a world-leader in steel — but the pace of change had sped up. Some of the cars snapped up by Scunthorpe’s happy Sixties shoppers would have weighed a ton and a half of mostly British-made steel, but cars were becoming steadily lighter and smaller. There was less and less demand for Scunthorpe’s product, even before the whole motor industry went into the doldrums, along with British shipbuilding.

Then as now, successive governments failed to capitalise on British technical ingenuity. Ted Heath hoped that the new local authority of “Humberside”, into which Scunthorpe was lumped in 1974, might be an English Ruhr. But BSC always found itself fighting, often unavailingly, against cheaper Asian imports and other countries’ tariffs. The would-be Ruhr sometimes seemed at risk of becoming more of an American-style rust belt.

Enter: the Iron Lady. In the first two years of her reign, Margaret Thatcher appointed the uncompromising Ian MacGregor as chairman of BSC. Two of Scunthorpe’s four ironworks were closed. A December 1979 announcement of swingeing cuts at Scunthorpe was dubbed “Mr MacGregor’s sick Christmas card” by the town’s mayor, and led to a 13-week strike. But MacGregor was up for a fight, and ultimately, he won. In 1980, BSC had employed 166,000 nationwide, and lost £1.8 billion every year; by the time MacGregor left in 1983, it employed 71,000, and annual losses had been cut to £256m. In 1985, it recorded its best results since the Sixties. Scunthorpe was a crucible of a new economic order, melted and remade by monetarism — but there was a human cost, as in the mining communities of the North. Unemployment nationwide was almost three times what it is now.

Meanwhile, the nation was losing its grip on the industries that built it. Now a profitable company, BSC was privatised, before being absorbed into the British-Dutch Corus Group — the biggest steelmaker in Europe and the third-largest in the world. Corus was itself taken over, just in time for the financial crash, by the Indian firm Tata, which ended up selling it in 2016 to a venture capital firm for £1. After reintroducing the nostalgic name, the firm sold the plant on in 2019 to China’s Jingye Group, which now operates as British Steel. With every takeover, hundreds of jobs were lost; since 2007, Scunthorpe’s annual steel production has halved from 5m to 2.5m tonnes. This most substantial of great British industries is now forced to trust in overseas investors with no stake in the borough, and its rooted community relies on boardroom decisions in Beijing. Britain’s steel production is, after all, something of an afterthought from a Chinese perspective; in 2019, the UK produced just 7m tonnes of steel, compared with the 996m made in China.

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By David Rose

The now barely British British Steel, reeling under high energy costs, is a pressure point for the Government. On the one hand, there is the wish to protect jobs in a “Red Wall” seat, won for the Conservatives in 2019 by the granddaughter of a steelworker. On the other, there is a national commitment to Net Zero carbon emissions, and steel accounts for around 14% of UK industrial emissions. Recently, British Steel has threatened to shed at least 260 jobs at Scunthorpe, and maybe as many as 800 — a quarter of all the jobs left — unless the Government gives it money to invest in greener electric furnaces. The Government has offered £300m, but negotiations appear to be foundering, because the money is thought insufficient, and comes with preconditions about guaranteeing employment for a decade. If all these Scunthorpe jobs do go, many Scunthonians fear they would be followed inexorably by others.

The Government claims to be committed to the industry, although support sometimes seems uncertain, and no new measures were announced in the latest budget. Steel does not contribute much directly to the UK economy — just £2 billion in 2020, when it accounted for 1.2% of manufacturing output and 0.1% of UK jobs. Still, there is strong ongoing and projected demand for steel — for projects ranging from HS2 to healthcare, flood defences to the military — and much of it could be produced here. Better to have our needs met in Scunthorpe than Baoshan, surely.

Industry veterans are sceptical about the Government’s Net Zero priorities. David Amoss, who spent 30 years working in Scunthorpe, points out: “The steel’s still got to be made and it may as well be made in Scunthorpe as in the Far East. I find this carbon footprint thing an absolute distraction and a nonsense. Not that I don’t believe we’re destroying our own planet, but if we don’t do it someone else is going to.” Steel that is not made here will just be made in another country, perhaps one with weaker environmental safeguards, and boosting their economy instead of ours. Steve Cook concurs: “From a global point of view, it’s just shifting the problem elsewhere.” Besides, closing down both furnaces could cost more than £1 billion.

Manufacturing has long been a victim of modern Britain’s focus on service industries over making things the world both needs and wants. “If steel does go, as a manufacturing country we’re buggered,” says Amoss. “I fail to understand how any country can really exist with any sort of wealth if it doesn’t make anything and consumes a lot.” To those who built their lives around industries like steel, today’s Britain can seem an unkind as well as unwise country, ungratefully casting off its past and recklessly mortgaging its future in the interests of expedience and profit.

The story of steel in Scunthorpe is unique, but it echoes that of the North’s, or Wales’s, mining communities. Our nation is replete with towns like this: so strongly associated with its industry that it is almost impossible to envisage existence without it. After 150 years of unglamorous and unrelenting endeavour, Scunthorpe’s whole reason-to-be has suddenly become ethically suspect, its Britain-building citizens at risk of being abandoned. Can a forward-looking national realism, drawing on an old sense of obligation, compete with today’s green and globalised agenda? This time-tempered town is not the only one nervously awaiting an answer to that question.

Between 1971 and 1981 Stirlingshire suffered a massive reduction in manufacturing jobs, but it was the eradication of coal-mining in the mid-Eighties that sealed the fate of many communities. The boredom and hopelessness which had taken hold in the previous decade had, by the Nineties, curdled into a detachment among adolescents, which was manifesting itself in violent disorder, substance abuse and criminality. In this period, before the false dawn of Britpop and Cool Britannia, rave culture was dominant. Radio-friendly tunes such as Let Me Be Your Fantasy by Baby D and Set You Free by N-Trance rang out in back bedrooms and chip shops, and blared from hatchbacks that raced the quiet lanes and waste grounds that once served local industry.

The village of Fallin lies three miles beyond the tourist trails of the city of Stirling. As a pit village, the miners’ strikes and subsequent closures had a profound effect on the community. Sunk in 1904, the pits at Fallin — Polmaise Colliery 3&4 — were in operation until 1987. Coalfields were not profitable and did not reflect the ruling Conservative Party’s vision for Britain, and so they went. The closure of the Fallin pits stripped the village of its purpose and ended four centuries of coal-mining in Stirlingshire. The mine there had once been record breaking in both its militancy and productivity; it was the first to go on strike in 1984, and it stayed out the longest — 56 weeks. It topped productivity ratings, excavating 1,400 tons of coal a day in 1976, and once removed 20,000 tons in a week. The bonuses earned at Fallin caused such embarrassment for the rest of the industry that Union leaders had to request that the men slow down.

The community was thriving within a few years of the coal seam’s discovery, and it produced successive generations of instinctual, red-blooded workers who were inured to danger and fanatical about coal: young men who were conditioned physically, mentally and socially by the work. Far from today’s view of mining as a kind of occupation of last resort, the men and boys of the village chose the toil and discipline of the pit over anything else. John McCormack ran a hotel and won the Scottish Cup with Falkirk F.C. as a footballer; he was offered four times his mining wage to go professional, but nothing could stop him working underground. “Many a person in my position would have gone to work in the hotel full time”, he wrote in his memoir. “But I was a miner all my days, and I couldn’t get away from the pit.”

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By Daniel Kalder

The colliery became not just the anchor point of village identity, but a special, albeit unmystical, space, inaccessible to outsiders, where husbands and uncles and brothers lived out the prime of their lives. Its underground shafts were a stage, where death was taunted with poetry and jokes, and where songs were sung under a low black ceiling that constantly creaked. It must have seemed inconceivable that the site to which the village owed its existence might disappear, but the shafts were sealed and the winding gear dismantled and, before 1987 was out, a dismal new era for Fallin began. Industrial estates sprang up offering minimum wage roles, and welfare-to-work schemes tried to capture the imaginations of men who had already had their heads turned by drink and drugs. Families stripped of their livelihoods, their optimism and the bonds of shared experience were soon being pulverised by heroin.

My high school classmates came from those families. The intergenerational trauma caused by addiction and poverty had had, in the decade since the closures, a profound effect on my school; there were at least four suicides in my year, including a hanging and a self-immolation, and a kind of adolescent ultra-violence was rife. Classes were dominated and disrupted by pupils, many from mining families, who were in complete rebellion against a society that had ceased to encourage ambition in their lives, and a curriculum which reflected nothing of the dysfunctional intensity of life outside the classroom. It has to be assumed that, given the opportunity, the young men may have become as fearsome and focused as their fathers and grandfathers once were, but they certainly weren’t mourning the loss of an imagined future. The collective imagination had already been seized by rave culture. Every bedroom I remember had its own devotional, Blu-tacked patchwork of spacey-looking rave flyers, covered in names of locally-famous role-model DJs who offered up simple, euphoric tunes that seemed to go straight to whatever it was that ailed you.

Is it possible to make a 16-year-old, fresh off a weekend of cheap stimulants and breakbeat hardcore, sit down on Monday morning and feel engaged or fulfilled by playing the theme from Steptoe & Son on a gut-string acoustic guitar? By piping meringues? By reading morality plays about people with moustaches? The kids of Fallin were travelling to enormous raves like Rezerection in Edinburgh, telling people they’d only just met that they loved them, forging their bonds above ground, in tents and fields. They were making money off drugs and burglary, racing banged-up Renaults under the moon, having casual sex in the woods that had begun to reclaim the rusting ruins of the pit machinery. Fallin was soon a warzone, scarred by graffiti, litter, fly tipping and dilapidation, and terrorised by youths whose energy couldn’t be harnessed by half-baked school and community initiatives which multiplied as uselessly as weeds.

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By Paul Embery

This generation, whose parents had been told by Margaret Thatcher that there was “no such thing as society”, had the misfortune to hit their teens between the era of unionism and strong community their fathers had known, and the spread of the internet, which a decade later brought learning, friendship and lots of free entertainment to hollowed-out places like Fallin. In between they had to build their own networks; dance music on cassettes, phoned-in requests to radio stations, pool hall doorways and car meets in the dark. They responded to their abandonment with a single-mindedness that was no-doubt inherited, and an exuberance born of having nothing. It was a reclamation of sorts, full of undoubtedly violent and criminal behaviour, but perpetrated by characters for whom nothing existed but the immediate present, who had matured quickly and lived on their wits, who were smart, roguish, likeable and full of inimitable schemes and stories.

During the hardest times of the miners’ strikes, such was the solidarity that it felt as if Fallin — the housing stock, the community services, even the land itself — were under collective ownership of families who belonged to the village. But as successive generations grew up in a place without a purpose this solidarity fragmented quickly. For the new generation, which had become accustomed to unemployed role models, there were no positive shared values; they didn’t feel they had a stake in anything local. John McCormack, the miner footballer who observed the breakdown of the community, said: “The number one problem is work. The fortunes of the village were always tied up with the fortunes of the pit.”

McCormack was one of many miners still resident in Fallin who could remember a much less chaotic time. Mining stories too often leave out the cultural and social richness cultivated by miners; in Fallin, this richness revolved around the Gothenburg pub, so named because it ran on the Scandinavian system whereby the committee-run pub reinvested 95% of its profits in the local community. “The Goth” opened in 1910, and its profits helped build the village bowling club, fund a local pipe band, and hire a community nurse. Stars of the day, including Kathy Kirby, played at the miners’ social club. Supported by the mine, Fallin became a regional centre of achievement in dancing, football, athletics and dog racing. The Millhall Colliery Pipe Band became three-time World Champions, and no less than 34 world champions of one kind of another lived in Fallin in the inter-war years. One of these was Bob Starkey, a champion wrestler and Highland Games athlete, a coach at the Paris Olympics in 1924, a Policeman, a soldier and a miner at Polmaise Colliery. Starkey later modelled for the kilted and vested strongman on the Scott’s Porridge Oats box, an image that became emblematic of Scottish health and masculinity in the twentieth century.

Today mining has a different set of associations. Films, documentaries and works of literature have sought to portray the struggle of the miners’ strike, and that world — busses, soup kitchens, whipsmart wives, soggy-collared men waving placards in the rain — is ingrained on the British consciousness. But the impact of the mine closures went far beyond Thatcher and the miners and the families themselves, and the scale of the stories left untold is vast. Too often inhabitants of mining communities have been reduced to statistics by studies seeking to explore the negative consequences of pit closures: the health inequalities, social dislocation and unemployment, which were (and in some cases still are) rife in Stirlingshire and other areas where mining was once dominant. Far less has been written about how these communities prospered, how they kept going through a poverty that was enforced on them, the strength they found in music and culture, their humour, their warmth, their wisdom. In the case of Fallin, how a young village, sunk in one short decade, began to right itself.

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In July 1988 the Stirling Central Regional Council opted for full clearance of the Polmaise Colliery site, to, “eradicate all traces of this failed industry”. The Goth still stands, having recently funded a defibrillator for the village, but of the pit itself only the bing — the huge mound of spoil accumulated during the mining process – is visible today. While there have been a number of suicides here, it has been successfully rebranded as “Fallin and Polmaise wood”, a nature reserve managed by the Woodland Trust. A small stone cairn was unveiled to mark where the shafts once were, and a memorial dedicated to miners who had lost their lives was installed in 1994. A memorial garden with some old pieces of machinery was opened in 2006. Numerous organisations have helped Fallin recover from the disorder of the Nineties, including Fallin Community Enterprises, a charity established in 2005 which aims to drive forward the social, economic and environmental regeneration of the village. It was unthinkable 30 years ago that anyone would want to move to Fallin, but the village continues to grow. In 2021, 400 new houses were approved for land to the East, but despite a 25% affordable housing requirement, it’s unlikely any of them will be within the budget of former mining families in the area.

Driving through on a recent Saturday evening the energy and turbulence is gone. A recent study described Fallin as a “non-place”, and at a glance it is hard to argue. Beyond the grey and brown houses, there’s nothing here: a row of half-shut shops, a flat-roofed library, a Tesco Express. It remains an austere village with no real centre. Some progress is evident — 72% of residents own at least one car, 33% have a degree — but below the surface are the same old community concerns. In May of last year residents of Fallin were asked what they felt the priority should be in any further regeneration of the village. Older respondents focussed on activities for young people (74%). The priority for younger respondents was school (67%) and they also mentioned things to do (64%). One respondent noted, “the people are our greatest asset”.

The new housing developments are bringing young families to the village, and the youth of Fallin today, raised on the same distractions as everyone else, are indoors — rightly unhaunted by the legacies of coal. Out on the streets, compared to the Fallin of 30 years ago the place looks nearly welcoming; some waste ground remains, but the graffiti and syringes are gone. Derelict sites have been converted to green spaces and sports facilities. On residential streets the hedges are square, the creosote fresh, SUVs are parked up at regular intervals. Looking up at the windows it’s hard not to wonder if any of the voices that could be heard requesting tunes on the radio all those years ago might be living here now, prospering somehow, with their own young ones. The odd hatchback whizzes past but the windows are up, the speed limit is observed. Rave seems about as relevant here as Kathy Kirby. There’s no music blaring anywhere.