Jeremy Paxman on Black Gold

The legendary journalist wrote a compelling history of coal mining in Britain and he met with our editor to discuss.

Jeremy Paxman

Jeremy, why did you write Black Gold, because coal doesn’t appear, at first glance, to be an obvious subject for you?

There were two reasons really. I happened to be in one of those little villages in South Wales, where I thought, looking at it, there is no reason why this this village exists at all because all the infrastructure of coal mining has disappeared from our lives. So, you know, the winding gear has disappeared, the slag heaps have been landscaped. And you think of that and you think also there is nothing more nakedly capitalistic than digging something out of the ground and doing something with it. And I rather admire those people who did, who did all that from scratch, and I just was interested to try to make something out of it.