My day at the closing of Tower Colliery the last deep mine in Wales .I arrived at the colliery at about 10 am. The place was full of news reports all clambering to get the best pictures and stories. My plan for the day was to try and capture some of the emotion of the day.

This was the Colliery that defied Thatcher.

Faced with closure in 1994, the men of Tower Colliery bought back the mine from British coal. A crowd gathered, respectfully to watch the miners of Tower Colliery march from the mouth of the pit for the final time."This is not a celebration but it is a victory," says the mine's chairman Tyrone O'Sullivan, 62, who led the buy-out 14 years ago. "It is hugely sad that Tower Colliery has to close. I have worked here for 40 years; my father was killed working here, my grandfather and his father worked here, too. "There have been four generations of my family working in Tower and it is a community like no other. It's very hard to get used to the idea that it's coming to an end. "But we have had 14 very successful years and the coal is exhausted. We were told back then that our jobs were gone, that British coal wasn't worth mining, that we couldn't make a living. "Thatcher and her followers shut down almost the whole industry and turned what were thriving mining communities into wastelands. "We were the only ones to survive because we bought our own pit. Since then, we have proved that coal mining still makes money. We were the only worker-owned mine in the world and that's a terrific achievement for every one of us."

Shooting Mode Aperture-Priority AE
Tv( Shutter Speed ) 1/125
Av( Aperture Value ) 4.5
Metering Mode Evaluative Metering
ISO Speed 400
Lens EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM
Focal Length 100.0 mm