KAOS at the Pit Tips

Somewhere underneath the landscaping, redevelopment and general passage of more than thirty years, I like to imagine there is still a faint chalk mark on a forgotten piece of concrete at the former Gedling Colliery.

KAOS.

There almost certainly isn’t. The surface I wrote it on has probably long since disappeared, and chalk was never built for posterity.

But for a brief period in the early 1990s, KAOS was my tag. When I say a brief period, it was likely just one afternoon.

I should probably explain.

When I was in my mid-teens, a friend and I spent quite a lot of time exploring the bits of Nottingham that were not really intended to be explored. This was the early 1990s, when teenagers seemed to enjoy considerably more freedom to disappear for hours at a time without anybody being entirely sure where they were.

Or perhaps our parents just made a serious error of judgement regarding just how sensible we’d be on our very loose leashes!

One of our favourite destinations was Pit Tips—our name for the sprawling remains of the recently closed Gedling Colliery.

Our timing, although we did not appreciate it then, was rather extraordinary.

Gedling Colliery had closed in November 1991 after nearly ninety years of mining. If my memory is right, our expeditions were around 1992 or 1993. We were not exploring some ancient industrial ruin that had been abandoned for decades. The place had barely stopped being a working coal mine.

Today, when something survives from our industrial past, there tends to be a nice path, an interpretation board and perhaps a QR code.

This was not like that.

There were still buildings. There was still machinery. Conveyor belts and great pieces of industrial equipment whose purpose I could not have explained then and certainly cannot now. Astonishingly in retrospect, two teenage boys could apparently just wander into some of it.

I have very clear memories of being inside those buildings.

I do not remember encountering security. I do not remember particularly substantial fences. I do not even remember having the sense that getting inside was especially difficult.

Fortunately, I also do not remember finding anything that offered access underground. Gedling’s mine shafts descended hundreds of metres beneath the surface, so I am extremely grateful that our particular brand of teenage curiosity remained resolutely above ground.

At the colliery, at least.

Because we had another underground playground nearby.

But before we get to that, there is the small matter of the vandalism.

Teenage delinquents. Sort of.

On at least one expedition to Pit Tips, we had gone prepared.

We took chalk.

Because while we clearly considered ourselves pretty badass, we apparently were not badass enough for spray paint.

Armed with our terrifying arsenal of coloured calcium carbonate, we liberally decorated bits of the abandoned colliery with our chosen tags.

Those tags provide an almost perfect way of dating the experience.

My friend chose Warchild.

Warchild was one of the surfers in Point Break, released in 1991 and therefore still relatively new. We were both into skateboarding at the time—although neither of us was especially good at it—so a Point Break-inspired alter ego probably made perfect sense to us. It was a respectable choice for a teenage boy attempting to establish an edgy identity.

I chose KAOS.

Not after a film. Not after a gang member. Not after anything anybody without an Amiga was particularly likely to recognise.

KAOS was a section from the first Megademo by a Danish Amiga demo group called Budbrain.

Even my teenage rebellion was nerdy.

Amiga demos were awesome

For anyone who missed that particular corner of home-computer culture, demos were programmers, musicians and graphic artists showing off. Groups produced increasingly elaborate demonstrations of what they could persuade computers like the Amiga to do, often seemingly exceeding what the hardware ought to have been capable of.

They spread on floppy disks, copied from friend to friend, and the best became minor legends among Amiga owners.

Budbrain’s first Megademo appeared in 1990 and included a section called KAOS. It clearly made enough of an impression on teenage me that I adopted it as my nom de vandalism.

So naturally I wrote it all over a recently abandoned coal mine.

In chalk.

Move over, Banksy.

Beneath the Pepper Pots

Pit Tips was not the only enticingly inadvisable place nearby.

Hidden in the trees was the eastern portal of Mapperley Railway Tunnel.

The tunnel had once carried the Great Northern Railway beneath the ridge between Gedling and Woodthorpe. Opened in 1875, it ran for 1,132 yards—just over a kilometre—before emerging on the other side of the hill near what is now Weaverthorpe Road.

By the time we found it, trains had not run through it for more than thirty years.

Getting there meant following the old railway cutting through the trees. One landmark I remember particularly clearly was an old burned-out Ford Fiesta sitting not far from the tunnel portal.

Because of course there was.

It was an abandoned railway cutting in Nottingham in the early 1990s. It would almost have been suspicious if there had not been a burned-out car in it.

The tunnel portal itself was simply open.

There may have been signs telling us not to enter. There may even have been some token attempt to discourage access that I have forgotten.

But whatever was there clearly was not sufficient to defeat two teenagers.

So in we went.

The tunnel had two ventilation shafts along its length, topped at ground level by structures locally known as the Pepper Pots, for the fairly obvious reason that that is what they looked like.

We knew them from above as well as below. At least one formed part of the site used by a local Scout group, and we had been to bonfire parties there.

Underneath, one of the shafts demonstrated another long-established local tradition: chucking rubbish into any sufficiently large hole.

People had apparently been using it as a convenient vertical dumping ground for years, resulting in an enormous cone of detritus piled on the tunnel floor beneath it.

We carried on past it.

Mapperley Tunnel had suffered badly from mining subsidence during its operational life, including a major collapse in the 1920s. After the railway closed, part of the tunnel was eventually filled.

But not quite all the way to the roof.

This was important.

Because if you are a teenage boy and somebody has gone to the trouble of filling an unsafe railway tunnel with tonnes of material but has accidentally left a narrowing gap above it, you do not interpret this as “clearly we should turn around.”

You interpret it as a challenge.

At first we could walk normally. Then we had to duck. Then duck a little further.

The ground kept rising towards the roof.

Somewhere beyond the earth ahead of us was the western portal near Weaverthorpe Road. Another Scout group had premises nearby, and friends who went there brought back tantalising reports that somebody had once dug around the buried portal and reckoned there was open tunnel behind it.

That was all the evidence we required.

We did not make it through.

Eventually the gap became sufficiently small that even our teenage brains began to register that crawling further into a partially filled railway tunnel with a long history of subsidence might not be entirely sensible.

I think we got to somewhere around where Plains Road runs overhead before finally admitting defeat.

Looking back, I find it reassuring that we apparently possessed some instinct for self-preservation.

It just kicked in considerably later than would generally be recommended.

There was also something beautifully circular about the whole expedition. One of the Pepper Pots above us was associated with one Scout group. Our mythical destination was beside another.

We were, quite literally, passing underneath one Scout group in a vain attempt to reach another.

Going back

Years later, I went back. I wrote about it on here, in fact.

By then the entrance was fenced off, which was probably a sensible development.

There was still a way in.

Which was probably less sensible.

In 2012, I returned with friends, better torches and the vastly improved judgement and maturity that comes with adulthood.

We went into the tunnel again.

We passed beneath the Pepper Pots again.

We reached the backfill again.

And we carried on until the steadily diminishing headroom persuaded us to turn around.

Again.

So apparently the principal difference between teenage me and adult me was better illumination.

What had changed much more dramatically was the world outside the tunnel.

The Gedling Colliery I remembered was gone.

The buildings we had wandered through disappeared as the site was cleared. The machinery and conveyors vanished. Nature gradually reclaimed areas that had once been dominated by heavy industry.

Even the waste recycling centre that had arrived on the site in the 1990s had gone, another brief role for the landscape blinked in and out of existence between my forays.

Eventually, much of the former colliery became Gedling Country Park.

It is, objectively, a much nicer place.

But it is almost impossible for me to walk around there without mentally superimposing another landscape on top of it.

I remember Pit Tips.

And I think that is what fascinates me most about these memories.

We happened to catch Gedling Colliery between identities.

For nearly ninety years, it had been a workplace. Thousands of people had passed through its gates. Generations had earned their living there. Coal had been hauled from hundreds of metres beneath the ground.

Then, in 1991, it stopped.

For a relatively brief period afterwards, the infrastructure remained but its purpose had gone.

And into that gap wandered two teenage boys with some chalk.

Today, I suppose what we were doing would be called urban exploration. There would be photographs, YouTube videos and online communities devoted to it.

We did not know we were urban explorers, we were making memories, not content.

We were just going to Pit Tips.

There is always a danger when remembering childhood of concluding that everything was better then.

It was not.

And I am not convinced that teenagers being able to wander unchallenged through recently abandoned coal-mining infrastructure and then disappear into a condemned railway tunnel represents an unambiguous triumph of early-1990s childhood.

In hindsight, some of it was bloody stupid.

But I am still glad we did it.

Because places in transition have always fascinated me. There is something exciting about somewhere whose original purpose has ended but whose next purpose has not yet arrived. The people have gone, but the physical evidence of what they did there remains.

Eventually somebody decides what happens next.

The buildings come down. The machinery is removed. The fences go up. The landscaping begins. Trees grow. Paths appear. Houses arrive.

And gradually the place you knew survives only in photographs and memories.

I suspect the days when people can wander into Mapperley Tunnel are numbered too. Development is pushing ever closer and, entirely reasonably, an open entrance into an unstable Victorian railway tunnel is not the sort of neighbourhood feature developers generally advertise in the brochure.

Perhaps one day it really will become inaccessible.

Perhaps that is no bad thing.

But whenever I pass that part of Nottingham, there is still another version of the landscape tucked away in my head.

A burned-out Fiesta in the cutting.

A black tunnel mouth in the trees.

Pepper Pots overhead.

The remains of a coal mine that had only just stopped being a coal mine.

And somewhere amongst it all, two teenage idiots wandering around with a box of chalk.

One of them was Warchild.

And the other—because apparently I was incapable of being cool even while trespassing—was KAOS.