“The other lot can have their titles, citations, and status – the Working Class Collective brought those stories back about Pit Ponies, about jobs done, about people who have gone– working class people whose lives rarely register anywhere.” Lisa McKenzie, WCSA member and co-organizer of the upcoming International Working-Class StoryFest, shares these reflections on the Working Class Fantastic Spaces event held on Jan. 27 in Bestwood Village, Nottinghamshire, England.

A coal mining town from the Victorian era until the closure of the community’s main coal mine in 1967, Bestwood Village, McKenzie explains, has also “been made famous through literature, the arts and films and plays.” DH Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers (1913), as well as Anton Corbijn’s Control (2007), a documentary about the life of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, are both set in Bestwood Village.

Hosted by the Working Class Collective, the Fantastic Spaces Event began with a tour of the Bestwood Winding Engine House, the Winding Engine being a machine that lowered miners into the mine shaft or “pit” and brought coal back up to the surface. Later, attendees gathered at the Village Hall and Miners Welfare– a community venue with its own storied history – for a showing of Dennis Potter’s 1965 televised play Stand Up Nigel Barton, a semi-autobiographical tale about a coal miner’s son who attends Oxford University.

Along with lively discussion of the play, the event served as a way for members of the Bestwood community to gather and “tell us their stories about Village life” – and “the turnout was incredible,” McKenzie says. “I visited the care home in the Village and invited the residents although many were very elderly and had dementia. I made sure they knew they were welcome.”

Read the rest of McKenzie’s account of the Fantastic Spaces Event here – and be on the lookout for more details about the International Working-Class StoryFest, happening March 22-23, 2024.