Did the Pits Closing Still Show? Britain's Coalfield Towns, 1984 to 2021

At the start of 1984 Britain still had a large deep coal industry; by the end of 1994 almost all of it had gone, and the last deep mine closed in 2015. Do the towns that grew up around the pits still look different from other towns, and does it matter when their pit closed? I compile a list of 196 deep mines working at the start of 1984 from the Northern Mine Research Society's tables of National Coal Board collieries and Wikipedia's colliery lists, with closure years and locations from OpenStreetMap, Wikidata and OS Open Names. 167 (85%) closed by the end of 1994, with a peak of 32 in 1985. Linking the pits to the ONS built-up areas of 2022, I find 209 pit towns of 2,000 to 100,000 people in England and Wales. Compared with towns of the same size in the same region that had no pit, in Census 2021 they have 2.0 percentage points more adults long-term sick or disabled (a comparison-town median of 2.9%), 3.2 points more adults inactive for reasons other than retirement or study, 6.5 points more in routine or semi-routine work, 8.0 points fewer in managerial or professional work and about £5,900 a year lower mean household income, but the same share in work. Towns with older collieries show about half the gap. Among pit towns, the year the last pit closed makes no clear difference. Because the coalfields differed from other places long before 1984 and no earlier baseline is used, these are associations, not effects of the closures. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/pit-closures/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/pit-closures. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/28/pit-closures/.