Chopwell

The reddest village in England

Small-scale mining at Chopwell dates to 1530, but it was the Consett Iron Company's arrival in 1896 that turned it into a proper colliery village, employing around 2,000 men and boys by the mid-1920s. A Communist Club, funded in 1913 by Kodak UK's managing director George Davison, gave radical politics an early foothold, and during the seventeen-month lockout that followed the 1926 General Strike, striking miners took down the Union Jack from the council offices and raised the Soviet flag in its place. Streets named Hardie, Marx and Lenin still stand today.

The village's mining banner, carrying portraits of Marx, Lenin and Keir Hardie, was presented to Soviet miners in the 1950s and displayed in Moscow's Trades Hall; a replica was later carried through Paris by French miners in 1998. Chopwell Colliery closed in 1966, and the village was controversially marked for managed decline, but it survives today as a quiet commuter village beside 900 acres of ancient woodland.