Mine

There's not much I remember from geography at school but I do remember being fascinated by the Ruhr valley with all its coal-mining and steelworks and heavy manufacturing. Our geography books had grainy black and white pictures of pit head wheels, of steel-work furnaces, of a train carriage shell suspended on chains from a huge crane-on-rails as it was swung from one end of a manufacturing shed to another. All that work vanished very few years later with the oil crisis and cheaper steel from Japan and now the brownfields have been ploughed and slag heaps are good sites for wind turbines. I've wanted to visit for years and today, finally, I got here.

The extra is part of a coke plant.


Black and white in colour 81