Revisiting "What Happened Here?"

Easington Colliery sits on the Durham coast, at the eastern edge of the Durham coalfield. During the 1984 Miners’ Strike, local women came together to support striking families through months without wages and growing pressure on the community. Based at The Colliery Club, they organised fundraising, food parcels, clothing, advice and daily hot meals. Alongside work, childcare and their own households, they built an operation that helped carry Easington through the strike.

Photographer Izabela Jedrzejczyk became closely involved with the group and documented their work in her series "Striking Women". Her photographs record far more than hardship. They show organisation, political action, care, friendship and the practical labour needed to sustain a community through crisis.

Thirty-five years later, Amber returned to that history with the people who had lived it. On 24 August 2019, Amber helped stage a Miners Picnic in Easington, marking the efforts made to defend jobs and hold the community together during and after the strike. Supported by the National Trust, the gathering formed part of a year-long engagement that became What Happened Here?.

The film draws extensively on the AmberSide Collection, bringing together Jedrzejczyk’s photographs with work by Keith Pattison, Aidan Doyle and John Davies, alongside Amber Films footage shot in Easington and Durham during the strike and its aftermath. But this is not simply a film assembled from an archive. The photographs and footage are returned to the people and place they came from, opening up memories of what happened, what followed and how those experiences continue to shape Easington. The story is told by the community itself.

Discussion: What Happened Here? Online Event

When Side’s cinema programme moved online during the 2020 lockdown, What Happened Here? was accompanied by a digital conversation that brought another generation of community organising into the discussion.

Heather Wood, central to the women’s support work during the strike, spoke with Chris and Bill from Cafe Together in Easington, a community food-sharing space responding to hardship in the village decades later. Their conversation brought the practical realities of 1984 into direct contact with those of 2020: how do you feed people, organise support and keep a community going when the systems around it are failing?

This discussion was a recorded digital event hosted by Side during the 2020 lockdown and is being re-released as part of our commitment to making the AmberSide collection more accessible to wider audiences.