Nottinghamshire Mining Museum
The coalminers of Nottinghamshire mined the coal that powered the county’s industries and kept the people of Nottinghamshire warm”. Our museum is not about kings and queens, castles or barons, lords, ladies, dancing and banquets in great houses. It is about the coalminers of Nottinghamshire. <strong>Our Museum is about the people, their mining lives, stories, jokes, laughter and heartbreak.</strong>
Our Museum
Our museum combines a traditional museum experience which describes and illustrates coal mining and a coal miner’s working life, through artefact displays and descriptions, written, oral, visual and digital;
Our Museum provides a hands on ‘learning experience’; lots of visitor interaction with artefacts and displays in a safe environment;
Our Museum offers a virtual reality experience for children and adults, using a combination of surround sound and video together with the use of virtual reality goggles to give visitors a unique ‘virtual’ coal mining experience;
Our Museum illustrates key aspects of Nottinghamshire mining community life through the use of archive material; oral, visual and digital;
Our Museum creates partnerships with other community, arts, theatre and heritage groups to promote our community’s pride in its coal mining history.
Museum’s Aims
- To collect and preserve Nottinghamshire coal mining artefacts
- To share these, in educative, informative and creative formats with adults and children from the former Nottinghamshire and neighbouring coalfield communities
- To inspire pride in Nottinghamshire’s coalmining heritage and the traditions of community, fellowship and solidarity that thrived in mining communities, through innovative partnerships with a wide spectrum of community, arts, theatre and heritage groups.
Our Museum’s purpose summed up.
To recreate and share with visitors, the unique experience of a coalminer’s working life; illustrating its dangers and hardships and the importance of team work, community and solidarity in such a dangerous environment. To preserve and pass on to future generations the pride felt by coalmining communities in these unique aspects of their life.
What we will do, who for and why will it be different?
Our museum is bringing Nottinghamshire’s coal mining heritage to life for children and adults through:
- A traditional educational and informative museum experience
- Hands on learning experiences
- Virtual reality opportunitie
We believe this experience will attract visitors from Nottinghamshire, other coal mining areas, and even visitors from overseas.
Beginnings
In November 2005, the Nottinghamshire NUM Ex & Retired Miners Association was born. Initially set up to offer advice and provide a focus for ex miners to meet socially and talk “pit”.
Almost immediately we began to receive artefacts, photos and miners lamps and all manner of memorabilia.
We had a request from a school in Eastwood inviting us to go and share our coal mining experiences with local children, many of whom would have come from families with a coal mining heritage. An educational opportunity was born. Although we didn’t realise it at the time, this was the start of the Nottinghamshire Mining Museum.
The Nottinghamshire Mining Museum Ltd., became a company limited by guarantee on the 3rd January, 2017, Company No. 10545292. We became a Registered Charity on the 25th April, 2019, Charity No. 1183126..
Our current home is in the East Unit of Mansfield Railway Station, opposite the Midland Hotel. We are open for most, but not all of the year, as we have to change and refresh our exhibitions and preserve our artefacts.
Exhibitions
Our last two exhibitions, ‘Brian Morley, Mining Artist’ and ‘Banners and Bands’ have each had over 1,000 visitors.
We will close this year from Sunday 29th October until the end of January 2024.
Our opening dates will be posted on the front page of this website and on our Facebook and social media pages.
We are looking to gain larger, permanent premises, to display and house our extremely large and growing collection of artefacts.