Phil Johnston

Industrial Blacksmith, Richmond Main Colliery

Me running a business out of here keeps this end of the site alive, especially the vintage machine-shop. This is open on a Sunday, I’m generally never working it, it’s a bit much when you’re here for five days a week working and then you’re here on Saturday doing voluntary work on steam locos to come up here again on Sunday, you drive up the road on Monday and you think ‘geez, I can remember being here only yesterday’. But that aside, people can walk into the workshop and they can see it’s being used and they look at it and go ‘hey, this place is still being used, people are still doing work here’. We’ve got piles of jobs on the floor and a pile of scale around the steam hammers. Sometimes it depends how late we’ve been working on a Friday night, the furnace might still have a bit of red heat or something in it, and in that aspect it keeps the place ‘lived-in’ might be a word. There’s a lot of heritage places that are fixed up, restored and nothing’s done with them. And yeah, they look pretty good for the first month, the second month they get full of grass seeds, and dirt and dust, the third month a couple of kids break a window, unless it’s really being used, they just tend to go downhill, especially something like a workshop like this. People sort of run it on special days and a belt might break but because there is no reason for them to fix it really they just take the belt off and put it to one side, and they set up a couple of jobs with the machines and sort of make it look as though they’ve used the machine but they don’t. Well it is just a mock up then, and I suppose there’s gotta be a compromise, we’ve got sort of modern machinery in the workshop, like a mid-welder and that sort of stuff, which obviously wasn’t around when the place was running, but yeah, you gotta make a compromise somewhere or other.