Art and heavy industry are rare bedfellows but the Pit Profiles, Re-Profiled exhibition at the Coalbrookdale Gallery in Ironbridge Gorge, Shropshire, shows the aesthetic side of the coal mining industry.
As Ironbridge’s senior curator Dr Matt Thompson points out, in the 18th century well-heeled tourists and artists came to places such as Ironbridge Gorge to experience the exotic fascination of the smoke and flames of the dark satanic mills, the iron works of Abraham Darby. Darby, as early as 1709, was the first to use coal successfully to make coke for iron-working, enabling the production of iron on a mass scale — the prelude to the Industrial Revolution.
http://www.ironbridge.org.uk/about-us/news-releases/2013/mar/pit-profiles-re-profiled/
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.