Astley Green Colliery Museum

The Astley Green Colliery Museum is a museum run by the Red Rose Steam Society in Astley near Tyldesley in Greater Manchester, England. Before becoming a museum, the site was a working colliery that produced coal from 1912 to 1970; it is now protected as a Scheduled Monument. The museum occupies a 15acre site by the Bridgewater Canal which has the only surviving pit headgear and engine house on the Lancashire Coalfield.HistoryAstley Green Colliery exploited deep coal seams of the Manchester Coalfield underneath the peat bog known as Chat Moss, and was driven by the high demand for coal during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the exhaustion of supplies of coal in the Irwell Valley. Shaft sinking began in 1908 by the Pilkington Colliery Company, a subsidiary of the Clifton and Kersley Coal Company, and the pit began production in 1912. In 1928 the colliery was amalgamated with other local collieries to form Manchester Collieries. The mine was modernised when the coal industry was nationalised in 1947. Astley Green Colliery was closed in 1970 and was subsequently opened to the public as a museum.