Coal mining
Is your home over old coal workings?
A quarter of Britain's homes sit on a coalfield, and shallow workings, shafts and rising mine water still shape what can be built and what a buyer should check. This page reads the Mining Remediation Authority's open maps for one postcode: whether it is in the coalfield consultation area, whether it is high-risk ground for development, which coal licences cover or neighbour it, and where the nearest mine water is being treated.
- Coalfield consultation area
- Development high risk area
- Coal licences within 3 km
- Mine water treatment
How this works
The Mining Remediation Authority, the Coal Authority until 2024, owns Britain’s coal and the records of every mine that worked it. Its coalfield consultation area is where coal has been mined or could be, and where a solicitor orders a coal mining report as a matter of course. Its development high risk area is the smaller part of the coalfield with recorded features at or near the surface, such as shallow workings, mine entries and past opencast sites, where a planning application must include a coal mining risk assessment. Licence areas show where the Authority has licensed coal to be worked, past, current or granted for the future, and mine water treatment schemes are where it cleans the water that rises through flooded workings. The page reads these four layers from the Authority’s open data hub for a point rounded to about 100 m and keeps the answer for a week. The Authority’s mine entry and shallow workings layers are not open data, so the high-risk area is the nearest public measure of them; the report for an address is the authoritative answer.
Sources
- Mining Remediation Authority: coalfield consultation areas, development high risk area, licence areas and mine water treatment schemes. Contains Mining Remediation Authority data licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
- Postcodes: postcodes.io / ONS Postcode Directory (OGL v3).