Graham (not his real name), an IT consultant from Surrey, bought the empty house more than 15 years ago as part of a batch of houses across the north-east. “We’ve got landlords living in Dubai, in Ireland – all over,” Boyes adds. None of them, including a Nigerian oil executive living in the US, are keen to talk. Taylor says landlords are now a mix of businesspeople with several properties and sometimes naive opportunists. “And that left the houses prey to unscrupulous landlords.”īoyes, who is 59 and the grandson of a miner, says several terraces have been demolished, including the streets that appeared in Billy Elliot. “But anybody who could get out did get out,” says David Boyes, a driving instructor and Labour councillor for Easington Colliery. Mining families were offered the chance to buy their homes for £3,000. Today, a miners’ cage lift stands as a monument on cliffs overlooking the North Sea. Yet the backdrop for the film – the 1984-85 miners’ strike – was the beginning of the end for the pit, starting a spiral of neglect that is still playing out on the street. Easington was such an archetypal north-eastern colliery that the A streets served as the location for the 2000 film Billy Elliot. There were two schools, a cinema and a brass brand. Everyone looked after the houses and everything was clean.” She can’t remember if their rent was £2 a week or a month.Īs many as 2,500 miners worked here for decades. “All the miners were working and everybody cared about each other. “It was lovely here back then,” she says. She grew up in Easington, where her father was also a miner. Wood, who is 76, keeps her late husband’s miner’s lamp on a dresser. A painting of a pride of lions hangs above the mantelpiece, which supports porcelain figurines of siamese cats. Her home of more than 40 years is immaculate. There are clusters of B and C streets, too, each built around the site of the former colliery.Ĭhristine Wood lives a few doors up from the empty house. They were laid out in rows off Seaside Lane, a high street that was extended east of the old village of Easington after the pit was sunk in 1899. The street is one of Easington Colliery’s A streets (their names all starting with the letter A) of terrace miners’ cottages. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian “When I tell my friends some of the values of the properties I’m selling, they can’t believe places like this exist,” Taylor says. He works in a rarely scrutinised sector of the market, where homes can cost less than cars, and rental yields can seem hard to resist. The auctioneer says he sells more than 100 homes a year at about £25,000, the majority of them in County Durham, which was once the country’s leading producer of coal. “She was overjoyed,” he says of the buyer, a beauty salon owner from the Midlands (who prefers not to talk to me). Russell Taylor, the managing director of Taylor James Auctions in Birmingham, says it is unlikely that any of them has even been to Easington Colliery, a coastal former mining town between Sunderland and Hartlepool.Īfter 22 bids made over a few hours, the house sells for £27,000 – slightly higher than the £25,000 Taylor had predicted. “Requires modernisation”, the online listing had said.Ī couple of weeks before my visit in August, I watch six people bid for the three-bedroom house in an online auction. Even the bannisters have been ripped out. A rusting skip waits to be collected on the pavement. The windows have been boarded up, the front door padlocked shut. The house at the bottom of a street in Easington Colliery is in a sorry state. ‘When I tell my friends the prices of the properties I’m selling, they can’t believe places like this exist’ £25,000 – Easington Colliery, County Durham
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