Epilogue: A coda for the 'Left Behind': Heritage and more-than-representational theories

It is 3 March 2010, a Wednesday evening, exactly twenty-five years since the year-long miners' strike of 1984-85 in the United Kingdom officially ended. I am sitting in the Forum Theatre in the Cultural Quarter of Stoke-onTrent, Staff ordshire, as an audience member for a twenty-fifth anniversary event that has adopted a format similar to the BBC's live debate series Question Time. Much like Question Time, the evening's event is guided by a Chair, Oliver Speight, and revolves around the perspectives put forward by a panel of five public figures: Edwina Currie, a Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for South Derbyshire from 1983 to 1997; George Galloway, an MP for four constituencies between 1987 and 2015; Ken Loach, an English fi lmmaker who directed Which Side Are You On?1 in 1985; David Hencke, an investigative journalist and author of Marching to the Fault Line: The Miners' Strike and the Battle for Industrial Britain; and Mike Nattrass, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the West Midlands from 2004 to 2014 and Deputy Leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) from 2002 to 2006. I am in the audience because I am fairly new to the region and I want to better understand the impacts of deindustrialization, as well as its enduring legacies, some of which I have come to recognize through my engagement with the city's distinctive heritage, which has created a landscape dotted with derelict bottle ovens that continue to haunt with their visual intimations of the past.