From Black Coal to Black Earth

Introduction

On one of those autumn days when it has been raining since early morning, we rush to close our umbrellas, stepping into the foyer of The NewBridge Project, a beautiful brutalist building in the center of Newcastle upon Tyne. Located in the heart of North East England, the city was once a prominent hub of heavy industry. We climb the stairs at the building’s entrance and pull back a curtain to enter the exhibition space, which greets us with darkness. It takes a few minutes to adjust our senses and start the exploration of the narrow corridors, rooms, and hidden corners featuring our artworks.

We invite our visitors to embark on a symbolic journey underground, digging into the history of industrialization in England and Ukraine so as to gain a broader understanding of our shared post-industrial heritage. Both of our projects started from a deeply personal ethnographic exploration of our family histories, and evolved into a broader artistic research project through dialogue between the Ukrainian and English contexts. Why is it important once again to reflect on the industrial past? What role does it play in our identity? How do we envision future transformations of (post-)industrial sites against the backdrop of the devastating war and climate emergency? And how does gardening help cultivate a new attachment to these places, transforming them from sites of extraction and toxicity into flourishing centers that encompass more-than-human infrastructure?

[Karolina]

I grew up with my grandmother Zoya Bazarivna in Vinnytsia, a city in the central part of Ukraine. Similar to many other Ukrainians, her family’s land and livestock were collectivized by the Soviet regime in 1931. In the face of this, a small kitchen garden became the only hope for their survival, and helped them endure the horrors of the man-made Holodomor famine of 1932–1933. It was in this very garden where Zoya, helping her parents, learned how to dig, prune, and fertilize the plants, passing this knowledge onto me two generations later.

Soviet terror and the wave of rapid industrialization at the beginning of the twentieth century created a division between crops, mostly used for grain production, and vegetable gardens. While crops were grown in larger spaces further away from where people lived, vegetable gardens were located on the private land around one’s house. Smaller pieces of land next to people’s homes were fenced. The Ukrainian word for garden is horod. It comes from the verb ohorodzhuvaty, which means “to fence.” The English word garden can be traced back to its proto-Indo-European root gher-, which has a similar meaning: “to grasp, enclose.”

[Alexandra]

Despite being born in a Ukrainian village, Khutor Shutovo in the Belhorod region, my grandfather Mykhailo Aleksandrovych abandoned the peasant lifestyle when he left his family home. After serving in the Soviet army in the 1940s, a comrade encouraged him to settle down in Donetsk, one of the largest industrial centers in Ukraine, where human labor was in demand. I grew up with Mykhailo and my grandmother near the Mushketovska-Vertikalna coal mine, a place where he worked until its closure.

The poor quality of the catering for the workers and the high price of food forced miners’ families to engage in subsidiary farming on dacha allotments (free plots of land allocated by the government through the workplace). Although my grandfather was entitled to receive a dacha, as many of his neighbors did, he refused for some reason to submit the request for a plot to one of those bureaucratically monstrous Soviet administration offices. While gardening became a regular summertime activity for many of my classmates on their grandparents’ allotments, I stayed in our city apartment.

During one of our strolls, my grandmother pointed to the plum tree opposite the wall of the neighboring five-story apartment building and said: “This plum tree is ours, your grandfather and I planted it. Let’s taste the fruits.” Before that moment, I could taste peaches, cherries, or apricots almost everywhere on the streets around my house – the area was surrounded by fruit trees with no discernible owners (as a child, I never thought I was committing a crime by tasting fruit from them). But it was the first time I felt proud, understanding that something belonged to me. “Already ripe!” we exclaimed simultaneously, with sweet plums in our mouths.

[Karolina]

The phrase “what belongs to everyone, belongs to no one” became an unofficial motto of the Soviet Union. Not just ownership, but also the intimate relationship between individual landholders and their local environment, abruptly ceased as a result of forced collectivization and famine, which went hand in hand with rapid industrial development. Peasants were unenthusiastic about working on communal farms to fulfil governmental orders after the terror they survived during the Holodomor. Consequently, these farms became synonymous with poorly managed work processes and low-quality produce. My grandmother worked as an engineer at the Vinnytsia Bearing plant. The plant, as well as schools and universities, frequently organized mandatory workdays at the nearby collective farms to help with weeding or harvesting vegetables. Unsurprisingly, this led to bias against communal gardening among many Ukrainians.

Nevertheless, those who stayed in villages or moved to the cities never lost their kinship with the land. Under the close monitoring of the Soviet state and on a smaller individual scale, they continued building relationships with their local environment through food self-provisioning. As happened with me, horticultural knowledge is often passed down through generations in practice. The COVID-19 pandemic and the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war have emphasized the importance of this practice for many Ukrainians. Research conducted in 2022 indicated that 65% of respondents planned to grow food in Ukraine, either on their own or someone else’s plots, while in the UK only 36% of garden owners claimed to use theirs for growing vegetables or herbs.

While a relationship with the land is important for people who work directly with it, it can be more obscure for those who do not have access to a private (or communal) plot. Exploring The NewBridge Project, the venue for our upcoming exhibition, I noticed a small vegetable garden on the building’s spacious balcony. Its vibrant greenery stood out against the backdrop of the surrounding brutalist architecture’s grayness. The garden was cared for by the TopSoil queer gardening group, which was established there in 2023.

“Many people who join the group are working class. Like myself. Half of my family is Egyptian, and the other part are miners from the North East,” said Izzy Finch, TopSoil’s co-founder, who herself did not grow up with a garden. She stressed the importance of having the skills of vertical growing on concrete, which the gardening group members can realistically do at home. Another nearby community garden, Shieldfield Grows, is located on the territory of arts organization Shieldfield Art Works. Its program manager Lydia Hiorns notes that private gardens are often depicted as inaccessible and associated with middle-class status, especially given the context of the area, which was historically inhabited by the neighboring factory workers living in flats.

[Alexandra]

In her book The Gardens of the British Working Class, Margaret Willes writes about North East miners’ enthusiasm for working in their backyards and allotments. She suggests that gardening “must have stood in stark contrast to the terrible conditions in which they worked underground.” As a kid, looking at the miners’ tired faces and black eyeliner, I liked to think of them as some sort of pharaohs in disguise, pretending to be ordinary workers. It made me reflect deeper on the miners’ route underground itself. The ancient Greek concept of Katabasis came to mind: a hero’s journey to the underworld – the realm of the unknown, a path through danger to find treasure – which results in the transformation of the character and changes the course of history.

In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell said that “in the metabolism of the Western world the coal miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil.” Looking at the glimmering lumps of coal, I couldn’t help but ponder: what if one man embodied both roles, and what if the fruits of his labor were equalized? Imagine the dinner tables of miners’ families adorned with coal lumps alongside flowers and fruits. How would this juxtaposition reshape the perception of their significance? By crafting still lifes from everyday objects found in the contexts of miners both in Donbas and Northumberland, alongside fruits and flowers, I started creating alternate, ritual-like scenes that prompt us to reconsider the intertwined relationship between labor, nature, and mythology in the industrial landscape.

[Karolina]

Located on the grounds of a former clay mine, Scotswood Community Garden exemplifies the ongoing post-industrial transformation of the urban landscape. A path that historically led to the mine entrance is enclosed with raised beds of soil brought by the garden’s founders. Apple trees were planted there, and at the end of each season these trees bend under the weight of large, ripe apples. The formal entrance itself serves as storage for pots and gardening tools. There are almost no traces of the place’s industrial past, other than a rusty piece of metal among the hedges – a mining tray repurposed as a planter. Once scarred by industrial extraction, Scotswood Community Garden has been transformed into a space of creation for the local community and wildlife. The garden is carefully designed and divided into different areas: native and mature woodland, ponds, wildflower meadows, traditional hedgerows, a shrub layer, perennial vegetables, thirty apple trees, beehives, and a kitchen garden area with a few compost piles.

Growing up hearing my grandmother’s stories about Soviet communal farms, I developed a cultural prejudice against communal work with the land. The community gardens of Newcastle particularly intrigued me when I started researching how ecological community initiatives function within the English urban (post-)industrial landscape. During the residency, I had the opportunity to visit five of them. Each community garden has its unique character, but all share a common thread – a connection to the city’s post-industrial legacy. Scotswood Garden was established on the site of a drift mine; Wild Roots occupies a pottery’s former coal storage area; TopSoil, SAW, and the Comfrey Project offer community support, green spaces, and gardening knowledge to those who, partly as a consequence of the city’s industrialization, had lost access to it. All of these gardens had to bring in additional soil for cultivation and implement careful garden designs, as the grounds on which they are situated are contaminated or of poor quality.

“Gardening and growing are important to people, but if they only want that, then the allotment fulfils that need. What people find here is a broader sense of belonging. ​That can take many different forms, but in the garden it’s very clear,” said Sean, the Scotswood Garden officer. By fostering the idea of shared goals and vision for the local environment, these gardens continue to make inclusive spaces for residents and other-than-human beings alike. The co-founder of Wild Roots community garden, Nick Figgis, notes that the very name of the initiative reflects a departure from the sole focus on productivity in food growing. Instead, it emphasizes “becoming stewards” of local patches of land by gardening “together with nature.”

During my visits to the Newcastle community gardens, I captured a photo series focusing on material artefacts of the transformation of these places from devastated post-industrial sites to thriving spaces for learning and care – spaces for community gatherings, handmade decorative elements, sculptures, repurposed objects, small manifestations of artistry, and wildlife corners.

[Alexandra]

To learn more about Newcastle’s industrial past, Karolina and I headed to The Common Room, a charity established in the historic building of the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers. It holds a fantastic archive of the industrial legacy, and, through new artistic perspectives and public engagement, aims to institutionally “support the equity of knowledge around the region’s industry, then and now.” While walking through and exploring the building’s authentic interiors, we discovered the Edwardian Lecture Theatre, one of the venues that was used as an educational space for delivering lectures on engineering and mining. Its walls were adorned with photographs of honored specialists in the mining field, predominantly elderly white men (except for one woman). Puzzled and slightly intimidated by them, we noticed eighteen empty frames waiting to be filled.

We decided to diversify this space with our artistic intervention, and fill the vacant areas with a selection of images of people and other-than-human actors – those who contributed to the development of the industry but historically did not fit into the hierarchical architecture of places like the lecture theater. The images represent different and often overlooked parts of the common history of coal: the miners themselves, women workers, pit ponies, the canaries used to sense gas in the mines, and the coal forests.

During the Carboniferous period, when much of the world’s coal was formed, plants, despite their giant size, had shallow roots. Throughout the middle of the twentieth century, as coal production reached its peak, people from all corners of the USSR arrived in Donetsk, in search of a better life and a way to smoothly integrate into the Soviet regime. Eventually, toiling hard in deep pits amid the dark, narrow coal tunnels made them leave behind their past, with its cultural heritage and peasant lifestyle. Dwelling in the earth in order to extract coal became a substrate of their newly obtained (social class’s) identity – the identity of miners.

These days, after the occupation of part of the Donbas in 2014, the uncertainty of such notions as origins, home, and roots have become even more pronounced. Reconnecting with coal as both a natural and a political phenomenon, I wonder if revisiting cultural senses, and artistic and research practices, are ways to regain this sense of belonging – to unearth our origins, reestablish connections, and draw closer to that which is truly one’s own.

Staying in Newcastle and delving deeper into the transformative impact of coal on the world, I felt a reconnection with the unique industrial landscape of my hometown, Donetsk, which I had left at the age of seventeen, disillusioned by the post-industrial environment, depleted land, and polluted air. While working on the project, I found myself immersed in nostalgia for the “terrikons” – the slag heaps, mountains of coal by-products.

Upon returning to Ukraine, I decided to reenact the labor that had defined my grandfather’s life. Accessing most of the industrial coal areas in the Donetsk region is impossible, as they are either in occupied territories or in the war zone. Instead, I discovered a coal slag heap in Chervonohrad, located in the Lviv region. When my mother learned of my plan to visit, she eagerly offered to be my video operator. I felt that this presented a unique opportunity to redefine our experiences of living in Donetsk and to obtain new roles: my mother, who had never been involved in anything artistic, became the director of the video project, while I, who had fled Donetsk as a teenager, became a subject seeking to reclaim something that belongs to me. I began to dig. Not underground for coal, as the practice should be consigned to history, and coal itself should remain undisturbed. Instead, I dug among the by-products of the slag heap, aiming to illustrate the absurdity of continuing coal extraction and emphasizing the importance of learning from the consequences of the fossil fuel industries.

Conclusion

Amid the energy crisis caused by russia’s war on Ukraine, and plans to reopen the Whitehaven coal mine in the UK, the pressing question of how to prevent a fossil fuel resurgence underscores the importance of reflecting anew on the post-industrial heritage in these countries and globally. Due to the occupation and active fighting, Ukrainian coal mines in the Donbas area are now at the forefront of the unfolding ecological catastrophe, leading to the contamination of the region and the possibility of reaching the Black Sea and Azov Sea. During the (Re)Grounding residency, we tried to create new perspectives to rethink coal nostalgia and highlight the devastating environmental consequences of the mining industry.

Industrialization leaves lasting physical scars on the landscapes it touches. It has also profoundly impacted human–land relationships and, on a broader scale, human–nature connections. In Ukraine, Soviet policies of collectivization, famine, and strict land control severed people’s intimate ties with their local environment and created prejudice toward communal land work. Nevertheless, gardening persisted, and embedded knowledge about self-provisioning practices is being passed down through generations.

In the UK, the ramifications of industrialization are intertwined with the further development of capitalist inequalities. However, former industrial sites, deemed toxic and economically redundant within a capitalist framework, have become focal points for ecological transformation. Community gardens and initiatives emerging from these spaces serve as catalysts for change, exemplifying how transformative action can spring from the post-industrial context. Their landscape and infrastructure serve as a reference to our industrial past but evoke imagery of what the future can be.