ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the construction, use and contestation of community by the participants in a club for the elderly residents of a former coalmining town. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s coal-mining communities came to constitute a major obsession of scholars concerned with the study of the British working class. This was perhaps unsurprising. The history of British coal-mining is a history of industrial action. The vision of mining people in sociological debate is, then, one of ultimate homebodies. Many are socially fixed, working-class with little opportunity for social mobility. Unquestionably they are spatially fixed. The central components of the idea of community constructed within the clubs are the linked ideas of homogeneity and solidarity. At one level these are animated by ideas about dependency. Homogeneity is represented as born of common dependency on the mining industry. At another level they are animated by ideas about class and occupation.
