Andrew McIntyre, CEO of Redhills CIO (charitable incorporated organisation).
John, members and friends of the City of Durham Trust — thank you.
It is a particular pleasure to receive this award from an organisation which has spent more than eighty years making the case that buildings matter: that what we build, what we preserve and what we allow to disappear shapes not only the character of a city, but the society that inhabits it. And I think Redhills makes that case particularly powerfully. Because this is a building in which it is almost impossible to separate architecture from purpose.
When Henry Gradon was commissioned to design the new home of the Durham Miners Association in 1913, he was not simply designing an office building with an unusually grand meeting room attached. He was giving architectural form to a great democratic institution. By then, the Durham Miners Association was one of the largest and most powerful trade unions in the country. Its new headquarters had to accommodate its everyday business — but also a parliament in which representatives from pits across the Durham Coalfield could come together, debate, disagree and decide. At mining’s peak, Redhills was the democratic hub of an organisation representing around 200,000 members. You can still read those purposes in the architecture today: the great front range containing the offices and committee rooms and, behind it, the assembly hall we know as the Pitman’s Parliament. And even the form of that room tells us something about the movement which created it. Its curved ranks of seats, human and collegiate, its gallery and its focus on the spoken word borrowed directly from the Methodist chapels they’d grown up in. That was not an accidental resemblance. It was part of the brief.
The early Durham miners movement was deeply influenced by Liberal Methodism — by a tradition of ordinary people gathering together, educating themselves, speaking, listening and reaching collective judgements. The chapel became a parliament. Outside, Gradon chose something altogether different. Historic England describes Redhills as a “striking and well-detailed Edwardian Baroque composition.” But the grandeur was not decorative vanity. The Durham Miners Association specifically wanted headquarters of sufficient quality and grandeur that its representatives could meet the wealthy coal owners on equal terms. And once you know that, the architecture begins to speak:
- The dome.
- The ashlar.
- The marble.
- The oak.
- The stained glass.
- The great sweeping façade.
This was built on the scale and with the confidence of a civic palace.
A palace built not by inherited wealth, but by organised labour. The men who paid for it were not wealthy men. Redhills was built from the pennies and ha’pennies of Durham miners. And yet they did not build cheaply. They built beautifully. They built for permanence. They built an institution worthy of the power they had created together. Redhills is not grand despite being a working-class building. It is grand because they believed that working people deserved grandeur.
But the really important point is that Redhills was not the only thing they built. Through the Durham Miners Association, working people organised to win safer work, fairer pay, better homes, education, healthcare, welfare and a political voice. Across the Coalfield they built the institutions of a better community life. They accumulated assets and knowledge. They forged relationships. They developed the capacity to organise — and the power to act. They called it their Coalfield Common Wealth, and depicted it on their banners. And Redhills was its democratic heart.
That democracy produced results. They fought for and won the minimum wage, minimum working age and maximum working hours — a gain we know better as “the weekend”. And they did not wait for somebody else to build the institutions they needed. Miners pooled their own resources to provide healthcare free at the point of need; education and libraries that unleashed the power of knowledge; welfare halls, arts and recreation that forged a proud culture; and homes for aged miners that provided dignity in old age. In short, they pioneered the forerunner of the welfare state…and all while William Beveridge was still in short trousers.
Historic England now explicitly recognises Redhills as a powerful symbol of a social reform movement which “laid the groundwork for the welfare state”. And this summer that national significance received further recognition when Redhills was upgraded from Grade II to Grade II*. Historic England now considers it the most outstanding example of trades-union-inspired architecture in England. The Pitman’s Parliament had already been selected for Historic England’s History of England in 100 Places, with historian David Olusoga choosing it as one of just ten places through which to tell the story of Power, Protest and Progress. And their description could hardly be more fitting: “working class leadership manifested in bricks and mortar.”
That, I think, gets to the heart of why this building mattered. And why losing it would have mattered. Because by the time the restoration began, Redhills needed more than a little care and attention. Saving it was a formidable undertaking. In the Pitman’s Parliament they literally took off the roof, removed the floor and dug down to bare soil — before painstakingly putting it all back together. And in doing so they rediscovered the remarkable craftsmanship with which Redhills had been built in the first place. More than a century later, our 21st-century builders arrived with three-dimensional laser surveying and modern concrete-pouring technology to recreate that sloping and curving floor. They had two goes at it. And still could not quite recreate its Edwardian perfection. When another specialist company came to create a bespoke infill allowing a modern stage to extend across the old clerks’ well, they measured the original Edwardian joinery and could scarcely believe what they found: a complex curve, fashioned entirely by hand more than a century earlier, accurate to within around two millimetres.
We tend to tell the history of buildings through the architects who designed them. But Redhills also embodies the intelligence, skill and pride of the people whose hands actually crafted it. And one of the loveliest parts of the restoration was seeing that tradition of craftsmanship passed on. Every one of the seats in the Pitman’s Parliament was carefully and lovingly removed and refurbished by a team of young apprentices from Sacriston, working under the tutelage of master joiner Nathan Hopkins and his Woodshed Workshop. They learned the craft of conserving things made to last. But they also learned about their own rich cultural inheritance. Among those seats was number 123 — the seat reserved for the representative of the Durham Miners Association’s Sacriston Lodge. The young apprentices took turns photographing themselves sitting in it. And they showed those photographs to their granddads. When they came back to work the following Monday, they came back full of stories. Stories about the pit. Stories about the Lodge. Stories about the men who had sat in those seats before them.
A century earlier, craftsmen from this Coalfield had used their skills to build a parliament for working people. A century later, young people from that same Coalfield were learning new skills by helping to restore it — and discovering that the history contained in this building was their history too. That, in miniature, is what we hope Redhills can do. Not simply preserve an inheritance. But to pass it on.
The restoration also had to introduce accessibility, fire protection, environmental systems, ground-source heating and new spaces without overwhelming Gradon’s building. One of its great successes is that the new work does not pretend to be old: it is confidently contemporary while respecting and complementing what was already here. That is exactly the balance the City of Durham Trust has recognised in making this award. And that achievement belongs to many people: our architects, conservators, contractors and craftspeople; our funders and supporters; our trustees and staff; and all those who sustained this project through the long years it took to complete.
But above all, it belongs to the Durham Miners Association. Because the DMA did something remarkable. It entrusted Redhills to a new charity so that the building could be restored and returned to the communities whose values inspired it and whose labour paid for it. That was a profound act of trust. And our responsibility now is to begin repaying it.
Because while Redhills survived, much of the Coalfield Common Wealth around it did not. Much of what those earlier generations built was subsequently dismantled. The pits closed. Secure jobs disappeared. Wealth was extracted. Institutions were weakened or lost. Assets passed out of community hands. And power became increasingly concentrated elsewhere. But not everything disappeared. Our culture survived. Our relationships survived. Our traditions of solidarity survived. And Redhills survived. That matters because the task facing us now is not to recreate the Durham Coalfield of 1915. It is to recover something much more important: the belief that communities can organise, create institutions, accumulate assets, exercise power and build a better life together.
So when we went back out into the former mining communities and asked people what they wanted this building to become, they were very clear. They did not want a museum to a vanished industry. They wanted Redhills to reprise its historic role. They wanted their inheritance put back to work for their communities. And that is how we begin to repay the trust placed in us by the Durham Miners Association. Our question now is not simply: How do we preserve what previous generations created? It is: What can their example teach us about what we might create next? How, in short, do we rebuild our Coalfield Common Wealth?
That is the renewed purpose of this renewed building. A place of history, certainly. But also of education. Culture. Organisation. And action. A place where children discover the inheritance of the communities in which they are growing up — and are encouraged to imagine what they might add to it. A place where people from across the Coalfield can once again come together, not merely to remember what their predecessors achieved, but to ask what they might achieve together now. Because perhaps the greatest lesson contained within this architecture is actually a very simple one: ordinary people, organised together, can do extraordinary things. Gradon gave that belief architectural form. The miners of Durham paid for it in pennies and ha’pennies. Skilled craftsmen made it real in brick, stone, marble and oak. More than a century later, another generation of craftspeople has ensured that it will endure — and a new generation of young people has begun learning what it means. Now the Durham Miners Association has entrusted it to us. Our responsibility is not simply to keep it safe. It is to put it back to work.
So, on behalf of everybody at Redhills — and particularly the Durham Miners Association, whose predecessors built this place and who have entrusted its future to us — thank you to the City of Durham Trust for this award. We are enormously proud to receive it. “The Past We Inherit. The Future We Build.” The restoration is finished. The real work begins now.
