‘Shining temples of health’: pithead bath architecture in Britain 1921–1939

Abstract

Drawing extensively on previously unseen archival material, this paper examines the development and evolution of the Miners’ Welfare Committee pithead baths programme from its initiation until 1939. It argues that the function of aesthetics seen in the mature forms of these buildings in the 1930s emerged from a response to the particularly complex and controversial conditions that surrounded the mining industry. It explores how the forms realised — and praised by Anthony Bertram and Nikolaus Pevsner amongst others — were the endpoints of a long process, one which had involved the negotiation of legislative and economic landscapes, and the engagement of scientific and hygienic theories. This process also drew upon critiqued and adapted international precedents in both bathing and civic buildings before alighting upon an architectural language that was not only flexible enough to respond to the precise criteria of washing large numbers of miners but also, when combined with other media, could communicate the value of such facilities to what were often sceptical audiences within traditionally conservative mining communities. Attuned to this range of functions, the result was a highly conspicuous and significant generation of over six hundred buildings that were iterative and underpinned by common principles, yet capable of variation within their organisation, interior and exterior forms, and components. This paper also explores the significance of these buildings not only within these qualities but also in the modern aesthetics of light, space, and air they invoked. Furthermore, the paper reveals the effects of their existence outside the collieries on other less visible protagonists — the women of the coalfields and their families — whose domestic circumstances were simultaneously transformed.