‘Durham’s other cathedral’: mining union hall reopens after £14m restoration

The Durham Miners’ Association building was designed so miners ‘would enter an entrance hall equally as glorious as the entrance hall of the owners of coalmines’. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Outside the impressively grand, Edwardian baroque building in Durham are two wooden benches, each dedicated to men who died too young.

They were, the inscription reads, both “sacked and victimised” during the 1984-85 miners’ strike. Yet they’re in grounds that look as if they might have been owned by rich, exploitative mine owners.