Four headgears still stand at Chatterley Whitfield, on the edge of Stoke-on-Trent, although they lift nobody now. Stoke City Council's account of the site lists original mineshafts, railway sidings, winding houses, a lamp house, a rescue station and the pithead baths across 10.5 hectares. It reads less like a ruin inventory than the contents page of a town whose purpose has been removed.

In 1937, Chatterley Whitfield became the first colliery to extract more than a million tonnes of coal in a year, according to Historic England's list entry. The local Friends group puts the workforce at nearly 4,000 when that record was made. I find the number hard to take in when set against the present photographs: not because the buildings look small, but because they look so entirely unaccompanied. A headgear makes sense as the visible top of a crowded underground system. Left on its own, it becomes punctuation without the sentence.

The usual story about a closed pit is told through absence: lost work, lost unions, lost wages, a district obliged to improvise another reason for existing. Chatterley Whitfield is uncomfortable because it kept so much of the apparatus above ground. Its scheduled monument status preserves shafts, heapsteads and sidings that refuse the neat version in which an industry vanishes and a landscaped memory takes its place. The site is green around the edges now, but the winding houses still explain exactly what the green is covering.

There was already an attempt to turn extraction into memory. After coal production ended, the site became a mining museum; the Friends archive records that the museum entered liquidation and closed on 9 August 1993. That second closure matters. A mine can stop because a fuel economy changes, however brutally. A museum closes when the machinery of remembering it can no longer pay for itself. Whitfield was left with the working buildings, then lost the institution meant to tell people why they were there.

Below the surface the break is blunter still. The Friends' history says the mine is flooded and three of its four shafts have been filled. This is not a Sleeping Beauty industrial site waiting for the right investor to wake it. The route down has been stopped, by water and by deliberate infill, while the structures that once organised that descent remain above it. I can imagine restoration of brick or steel; I cannot imagine restoring the relation between the buildings and the work without turning the whole thing into theatre.

Historic England now records the colliery on its Heritage at Risk register in very bad condition. Preservation sounds like a settled kindness until it reaches a complex this large. To keep a lamp house, a winding house, sidings and headgear is to inherit maintenance on the scale of the vanished industry, without the industry. Demolition would be a cleaner lie. It would let the landscape pretend that coal had passed through North Staffordshire without leaving architecture heavy enough to outlive its income.

I don't think the buildings need to become beautiful in decline to matter. Their value is more awkward than that. They occupy ground that once joined thousands of shifts to a national appetite for coal, and they still make that appetite visible after the labour has been sealed below water. On a quiet day, the headgear isn't an emblem of a lost future. It is a large, literal obstruction to forgetting how the recent past was powered.

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