Miners' Modernism - Pithead Baths: Past, Present, Future lecture
01/07/2024
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Big Pit National Coal Museum
Miners' Modernism - Pithead Baths: Past, Present, Future lecture
Monday 1 July 2024
2pm to 3pm
Big Pit National Coal Museum, Blaenafon, Wales NP4 9XP
FREE
An illustrated talk by Gary Boyd, Professor of Architecture at Queen’s University Belfast on a new collaborative research project between Queen’s University Belfast and the Twentieth Century Society.
From 1926 until the early 1950s more than 800 pithead baths were designed and built in coalfields across the UK. 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. However, pithead baths have received scant recognition within architectural and social history. What research has been carried out has focussed 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 UK.
This talk is made possible with funding from the Mellon Foundation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and supported by the National Coal Mining Museums of England, Scotland and Wales.
Do you require a Welsh language translation at the lecture? Please email bigpit@museumwales.ac.uk to inform us in advance.
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The Twentieth Century Society is an IHBC (Institute of Historic Building conservation) recognised CPD provider.
The Twentieth Century Society is a registered charity, no 1110244
Above: Clockface Colliery pithead baths.
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