Kingswood Coal

Matt Southway and David Hardwick

Edited by Steve Grudgings for SGMRG

South Gloucestershire Mines Research Group, 5th edition, 2015

Softcover, 40pp, illustrated throughout, A4

ISBN: 978-0-9553464-2-2

Price: £8.00

When I started exploring what remained if the Bristol Coalfield in the 1980s, the most helpful and informative sources were Matt Southway’s three-part series ‘Kingswood Coal’ published in BIAS Journal between 1971 and 1976 - 50 years ago! Matts description of the pits and his inclusion of the grid references was invaluable as Google Maps and the Internet had not yet been invented.

Fast forward 45 years and, despite extensive further research, the accuracy and detail of Matts descriptions still hold up - a remarkable achievement given his research was done without electronic assistance. I continue to refer to Kingswood Coal when in doubt, it rarely disappoints. Whilst I never met Matt, what remains of his extensive correspondence indicates he was a modest and helpful gentleman.

SGMRG published this combination of Matt’s three articles together with David Hardwick’s fourth article describing the coalfield around Yate, Rangeworthy and Cromhall back in 2008; it has been the proverbial best seller. We added photographs of some of the sites referred to but did not change any of the text and so word for word and page for page, it’s a hard act to follow and printed on high quality paper at only £xxx it represents superb value.