One of my earliest memories is of this view from a platform. I took the photograph today standing on the same spot where, as a child of pre-school age, I would hold my mother's hand and wait for the Pines Express train to arrive. I'm not aware that I ever rode on it, but I do recall the drivers waving to me while passengers embarked. The line it ran on was closed in March 1966, shortly before England won the World Cup. Over the subsequent decades there have been various attempts to restore the station, and these at last seem to have come to fruition.
To find a fragment of your life reconstructed as others' heritage experience is a strange and rather melancholy thing.
It's also a reminder of how subjective our sense of personal history is. Although its heyday was long gone before I was even born, the last pits in the Somerset coalfield were still yielding coal as recently as 1973, when I was 15 years old. The town I grew up in, its neighbour and their surrounding villages owe their existence to coal. Yet despite my growing up familiar with miners' cottages, pubs called The Miner's Arms and a slag heap known as "the batch" being visible - as it still is - on the horizon when I looked out of my parents' bedroom window,
I've never thought of myself as having any connection with the industry. Steam trains yes; coal, no.
I suppose it's obvious why. But it's still interesting to me to have felt rather like a tourist in my passing enounters with the gradual formalisation of the coalfield's place in the local history. When the restored pit head winding wheel
announced itself as a symbol of civic identity, it took me by surprise. And when I spent an hour in the Coalfield Heritage museum this afternoon, I felt more like an inquisitive outsider than someone with roots in the area.
There were, though, two exhibits with which I felt a connection. One was the school desks.
At my schools I sat at several exactly like them - they must already have been historical relics. The other was the cautionary poster
advising respectable young girls or women about the dangers of seeking "a situation" in London and urging them to take refuge should it be required in a children's home run under the auspices of the Rev. T Bowman Stephenson, founder of the National Children's Homes. The location of this institution? Bonner Road E2 - a short distance from where I live now.