Distance: around 7-8 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: Easy

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. from Dropbox

A walk to the derelict Chatterley Whitfield Colliery on the north eastern edge of Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire. The colliery once employed over 1,000 people and shut in 1977. Today it is boarded up and crumbling but remains almost entirely intact.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

Chatterley Whitfield: a Vast 19th and 20th Century Coal Mining Timecapsule

Whitfield Valley lies in the north western quadrant of Stoke-on-Trent near the road towards Biddulph. The first coal was dug here in the 14th Century, with subsurface mining commencing in the 17th Century, several generations before reliable steam driven pumping technology enabled the sinking of truly deep pits.

This 600 year long story drew to a close in 1977 when Chatterley Whitfield the final colliery in the area shut. After centuries of mining the area’s coal seams had been almost entirely exhausted, so closure had been anticipated since the early 1950s when output in the valley first began falling.

When a final closure date for the pit of the 25th March 1977 was set by the National Coal Board, a charitable trust formed by members of the local community came forward looking to establish a museum on the site. In many ways Chatterley Whitfield was well suited for the creation of what would be the UK’s first preserved coal mine museum. As well as relatively modern colliery buildings all intact, the site had buildings, infrastructural fittings and other features going back to the mid-19th Century when the pit had first opened. Aspects which if preserved would allow visitors to understand and tangibly connect with the story of the UK’s deep level coal industry from Victorian times up until the late 20th Century.

A key attraction for visitors would be the chance to journey down the pit and get a sense of what it was like to work underground at the coal face. After a spell of maintenance and preparation once the mine had shut, the charity now looking after Chatterley Whitfield opened the museum in 1979. Initially the mining museum was a great success, attracting around 70,000 visitors a year, at a time when the UK’s heritage and leisure sector was a fraction of the size it is today.

Beneath the surface however, a problem was soon unearthed. Towards the end of Chatterley Whitfield’s life as a working colliery it had been conjoined with the neighbouring Wolstanton Colliery by a 4 mile long underground corridor. Wolstanton was a deeper pit with a longer life expectancy, however, by 1982 it too had reached the end of it’s economic life. When Wolstanton shut the pumps which had kept water out of the mine workings were closed off. Because Wolstanton was the larger pit with a longer life ahead of it, when Chatterley Whitfield was being run-down by the National Coal Board it’s pumping equipment was turned off in favour of Wolstanton’s.

With Wolstanton now shut the water level down the mine shafts would inevitably rise eventually flooding all of the workings below a certain level. Whilst it would take many years for the water to reach a level that would flood Chatterley Whitfield’s relatively low level workings (still between 914 and 700 metres below the ground), methane gas would build up in the meantime, as there was no longer any ventilation down the pit. This made the subterranean parts of the site an incredibly dangerous environment forcing the closure of the only recently opened “underground experience” during the course of 1982.

This left the museum without it’s star attraction, which formed the pinnacle of it’s visitor offer. The National Coal Board, aware of the problems its decision to close Wolstanton had caused the Chatterley Whitfield Museum, agreed to part fund the creation of a new “mining experience” at great expense using old workings from the 1850s which were pretty near the surface. This opened in 1986 to great fanfare.

Unfortunately visitor numbers had tailed off and the costs of maintaining the elderly industrial site in good working order kept mounting. In August 1993 the charity running the colliery as a museum collapsed into liquidation, bringing the site’s second innings to a close.

Today the former mining complex has entered a third phase of life. Now cared for by the Friends of Chatterley Whitfield, who open parts of the site up for tours on Thursday and Saturday morning throughout much of the year, it has achieved a rickety, yet still intact, status as a local landmark, curiosity and a degree of celebrity as a modern ruin.

It was via Instagram modern ruin accounts and hashtags that I first encountered this vast, almost entirely complete, former colliery, gently returning to the elements on the northern fringe of Stoke-on-Trent. Having been aware of it for a couple of years, and finding myself with a spare day, I thought that I’d get the train up to Stoke and have a look. Putting together a walk to Chatterley Whitfield Colliery for anybody else who fancies going to go and have a look at this amazing and fascinating survival from an earlier area of carbon capitalism.

The Walk

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. from Dropbox

I create the Walk Midlands routes via Ordnance Survey Maps Explorer enabling me to take them on my phone. Subscribe yourself via the banner above.

This Walk to Chatterley Whitfield Colliery from Stoke-on-Trent Station starts from the exit next to Platform One, opposite the North Stafford Hotel and Federation House.

Turn left on leaving the Station building and walk a short way down Station Road towards a roundabout and the junction with College Road. Here you’ll find the compact, modern and bustling (in term time at least) Stoke-on-Trent campus of Staffordshire University.

Head right onto College Road which splits the campus in half and keep on walking up it once you pass the university buildings.

At this point you’ll enter an interesting cosmopolitan area comprising shops aimed at both students and the area’s large South Asian community. It consists of tightly packed late 19th Century vintage terraced houses, very possibly built for employees of the railway company.

After 5-10 minutes walking you reach the top of College Road, by a small roundabout, and see Hanley Park opposite you.

Cross over the road and turn through the set of ornate gates on your right.

Having passed through the gates enter the park and then turn left going past an ornamental lake.

Presently you’ll see another smaller path splitting off from the main path to your left. This path heads up a short steep bank in the direction of a grand pavilion type structure.

Head up this bank and you’ll find yourself on the towpath of the Caldon Canal.

Having reached the canal turn right and begin walking down the towpath.

All in all, the next stretch of the walk which is just over three miles, takes place entirely on the towpath.

The Caldon Canal opened in 1779, making it one of the older parts of the UK’s canal network. For a walker, boater, or other user of the route, whether on land or water, this means that it’s rather twistier than later waterways which made greater use of engineering techniques and technologies to ensure a straighter line.

Having left Hanley Park this section of the walk starts off quite urban, walking past current and former factory sites, new canalside housing estates and in the shadow of a cluster of prominent local authority high-rise black grouped dramatically on top of a steep ridge.

Pottery making, the most significant of the city’s traditional industry, retains a presence. Relatively early on in the walk you pass the Emma Bridgewater Pottery Factory whose production plant and studios sit in an old building by the canal.

As well as a twisty narrow route the canal also has some impressively low bridges. When it came to this one, I – far from the tallest man in the world – had to slightly stoop to pass under it.

Just after the bridge I came across two fine little examples of the region’s traditional pot bank kilns, marooned in the middle of a new-ish, pleasant-ish, development of canal side flats shaped vaguely like warehouses.

Not unlike the Black Country at the other end of Staffordshire, Stoke retains a fair few factories in comparison to much of the UK.

However, having passed by an industrial estate accessed via a lifting canal bridge, which is home to a little plant that makes use of a lot of gas cylinders, the route’s character becomes first suburban.

Then quite rapidly almost rural as the canal follows a course right on the edge of the city’s main built up area.

After a couple of miles of this my map told me that it was time to turn off and begin heading north, as I was now more or less directly beneath the Chatterley Whitfield Heritage Park where the former colliery is situated. Unlike the canals in the West Midlands I am used to, however, it seems that canals in Stoke-on-Trent, or the Caldon Canal at least, do not have especially frequent exits.

Shortly after passing The Foxley Pub and entering another more built up stretch of canal, you come to a road bridge bearing signs for the nearby Millrace Pub and a general store.

Passing under the bridge you will see a pathway on your right leading up off the towpath onto the road. So turn left off the towpath and head up it.

At the top turn right and walk over the canal bridge.

After walking a short way up the road beyond the bridge, just prior to a little green and the Millrace pub, turn left along the short terraced Hardman Street.

At the end of Hardman Street on your right stands a little snicket way between two tall green hedges.

Walk down this and onto the unpaved back lane it leads onto. This is Foxley Lane and will lead back to The Foxley pub you saw from the canal.

Once you reach the pub’s car park, walk across it to the road on the far side and then turn left.

On the day I walked past the pub was closed, but it had an enticing looking fast food van open next to it. I didn’t stop, but it looked like a good bet if you wanted to stop for lunch at this point. Alternatively the small town of Milton which The Faxley lies on the edge of seems to have a number of bakeries, pubs and small supermarkets where meals, refreshments and other supplies, if you need sustenance at this point in the walk.

Having passed, The Faxley walk straight along Milton Road through a little industrial and trading estate.

You will pass under a bridge and having walked passed several depot type yards and warehouse units.

After walking up a short slope towards a set of traffic lights, you will come to a bridge.

This bridge which has a residential housing estate beyond it, formerly carried the old railway line which used to run up past the colliery.

Immediately after the bridge on your right is a clearly marked path – part of National Cycle Route system – that leads off into a copse.

Follow the track into the copse and after about five minutes you come out by the large, and quite serene, Holden Lane Pools. This feeds the nearby Caldon Canal which you have just walked along.

When you reach this reservoir follow the path straight ahead and around the side of the lake.

At the far side by where you will have noticed an Aldi supermarket next to the A53 which runs along an embankment next to where you stand, there is a short tunnel which you can walk through to get to the next stage of the walk.

The next stage of the walk is one of the most pretty and interesting. It takes you along a shallow valley next to the wild and picturesque Ford Green Brook.

This section is interesting and also uncanny, both sides of the valley have the feel of land which has been reclaimed, testimony to the centuries of mining, quarrying for natural resources in the area.

Part way along this section I encountered this little pony grazing in a field next to the path. I did wonder to myself whether it might be a descendent of the pit ponies that used to be used in the collieries thereabouts. However, when I looked into it apparently Chatterley Whitfield at least retired it’s final pit ponies in 1932, so the connection would be slight at best.

At the head of the valley that Ford Green Brook runs through you come to a road. Cross over it and enter the Whitfield Valley Nature Reserve.

Here the terrain becomes a bit flatter and more open. This area was previously used to marshall the coal being drawn from the pits further north and loading it onto trains. However, after that ceased it was reclaimed into the nature reserve that’s on the site today, which opened in the early 1990s when there was extensive funding, especially in areas of high unemployment like Stoke at the time, for such projects.

The Nature Reserves’ well kept tarmacked path following the line of the old railway makes for easy walking, and despite having been moving for well over two hours by this point, I covered the ground quickly.

Having walked past a small sports training ground on my left and several fishing ponds, quite possibly remnants of some kind of extractive industry on my left, you eventually come to the end of the Nature Reserve.

A green metal bridge across the Ford Green Brook marks the boundary between the Whitfield Nature Reserve and the Chatterley Whitfield Heritage Park within which the former colliery lies.

From the banks of Ford Green Brook the contrast between the two sides of the stream are stark. On one side the land has been transformed into a fairly standard country park, on the other long sprawling mounds of colliery waste, hauled out of the ground over the course of more than 300 years of deep mining stretch into the distance. Slowly scrubby trees, bushes and grasses are terraforming the jagged hills into something resembling a terrestrial vista, but the black traces of coal are still visible on the surface of the land if you look in one place intently for more than a few moments.

Once you’re into this strange landscape, you are immediately confronted by three different paths. I decided to split the difference and take the middle one, walking up a short flight of new looking steps onto a track paved with little red stones, then straight along a tarmacked path on the right.

This leads you a winding route through the ash trees which are growing on the slag heaps steep sides.

By all accounts they were once even steeper. The current long meandering heaps of slag which stretch for hundreds more metres radiating out from near the middle of the site, were created during remedial work between 1976 and 1982 undertaken by the National Coal Board to ensure that the piles of colliery waste were safe and wouldn’t collapse triggering an Aberfan type landslip disaster.

After several minutes of walking steadily along a path that curves around the slap heap slowly rising up it, a tall factory style chimney appears in the distance above the trees.

This is the chimney of Chatterley Whitfield Colliery which was constructed in 1892 to serve as an exhaust for the mine’s steam powered pumping and winching equipment.

Presently the chimney looms larger against the skyline and you come to a tall metal fence. This fence guards against interlopers entering the colliery site, probably largely for their own protection, given that parts of the complex haven’t had much maintenance for nearly half a century and the deepest mine shaft is sunk to a depth of nearly one kilometre.

As you continue following the path around presently other colliery buildings begin to reveal themselves amidst the trees and undergrowth which cover parts of the site.

Presently you get a good view of the mine’s many surviving headstocks and winding gear, all rusted, but still quite sturdy looking.

After following the path round for 100 or 200 metres I decided to climb a little bank which had the outlines of a track worn into it’s ridge so as to get a view of the whole complex.

The views in my opinion were well worth traversing most of the north western quadrant of Stoke-on-Trent to get there.

Getting Back

Having surveyed the full extent of the site, I descended from the bank, returned to the path, and walked past a couple of little fishing ponds on my way to the exit from the Heritage Park and the A527 road.

Turning onto the road I walked for a few minutes to the bus stop opposite the unusual looking abandoned Jester pub. Here I caught the frequent 7A which runs to Hanley Bus Station from where I walked the relatively short distance (just over a mile) back to Stoke-on-Trent Railway Station. It is also possible to catch several buses from Hanley Bus Station to Stoke-on-Trent Station, including the 21, 24 and 25.