"I am Alex Gibson from William Saunders Partnership in Newark I currently manage the Pleasley Colliery site on behalf of The Land Trust. Pleasley Colliery was sunk in the 1870s and produced coal until 1983. Before nationalisation in 1946 it was owned by the Stanton Ironworks Company which had leased the mineral rights from the father of Florence Nightingale. Pleasley was the first pit to install electric lighting underground in the UK. The site has escaped complete demolition after closure due to the emergency Grade 2 listing of the buildings which happened in 1986. The site was later added to the Schedule of Ancient Monuments and has the protection of that schedule.
"As you stand and look at the site today there is only a fragment of what once stood, where once there were 2 chimneys there is now only one. The bank of external boilers that provided the steam for the steam winders which were located to the side of the chimney have been removed along with the other support buildings, including the washery, coal preparation plant, the baths and the workshops and other railway infrastructure that was once in place.
"The remaining parts of the site are mainly present because it was one of the last examples where steam winding was still in use within the coalfields everything else having been replaced by electric winders. The shafts were some of the deepest in the coalfield, with Pleasley being situated on top of a hill and the shafts going all the way to the bottom of the coal measures. In fact the shafts were in the order of 20 times deeper than the height of the current remaining chimney, which is now 40 metres from the ground to the capping plate. Within the existing buildings remain the steam winders, one of which was installed in 1904 by The Lilleshall Company Ltd and the other in 1922 by Markham and Company Ltd of Chesterfield. The north winder, the Lilleshall one, is believed to be the only surviving example and has recently been restored by The Friends of Pleasley Pit."