Qualla: Ashington

Ashington: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oliver Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1934, a handful of Ashington coal miners signed up for evening art classes. They were tired after long shifts in the pit, and a few pounds extra from selling their paintings at the local market would help. None expected what came next. Within a decade, their work was hanging in prestigious galleries; by the 1970s, the world had rediscovered them as the Pitmen Painters, and their canvases were touring internationally. Ashington has a habit of producing extraordinary people from ordinary circumstances. Two brothers from the colliery rows would lift the World Cup for England. A dialect spoken nowhere else in the world, Pitmatic, still survives in this town once called the largest coal-mining village on Earth.

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Image: Oliver Dixon | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ashington: Essendene's Dene

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RHaworth, CC BY-SA 3.0. The name Ashington comes from the older form Essendene, traced back to records from around 1170. Most likely it began as Aesc-dene - the wooded valley of an Anglo-Saxon called Aesc, or perhaps simply ash dene, the dene lined with ash trees. The Wansbeck dene runs through here sti...

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Image: RHaworth | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ashington: The Hirst Grid

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alex McGregor, CC BY-SA 2.0. As the collieries expanded, the Ashington Coal Company built parallel rows of houses to hold the workforce. The Hirst End was laid out on a grid: streets running north to south were named for British trees - Hawthorn Road, Beech Terrace, Chestnut Street. The east-west streets wer...

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Image: Alex McGregor | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ashington: The Pitmen Painters

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Clark, CC BY-SA 2.0. What began as an evening pastime in 1934 became something none of the participants had anticipated. The Ashington Group, as they called themselves, painted what they knew - pit cages descending, colliery rows, family life, miners washing in tin baths in front of kitchen fires. Cr...

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Image: David Clark | CC BY-SA 2.0

Ashington: After the Pits

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Phil Thomas, CC BY 2.0. Until 1988, most men in Ashington worked underground. The closure of the deep pits hit hard. Ellington Colliery, the last of the big mines in the area, hung on until January 2005, when it too closed. The Wansbeck Business Park rose where Ashington Colliery once stood, home now to...

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Image: Phil Thomas | CC BY 2.0