Tower Colliery

British Coal closed Tower Colliery on 22 April 1994 but the workforce refused to give up and after pledging £8,000 each from their redundancy money bought the pit On 3 January 1995 the Colliery re-opened under the ownership of the workforce buy out company Goitre Tower Anthracite. Having extracted the economically attainable reserves the colliery was last worked on 18 January 2008 and the official closure occurred on 25 January. The company is currently involved in a joint venture with Hargreaves to extract a further 6 million tons of anthracite from an opencast operation.