Every July, Durham fills with banners and brass for the Durham Miners’ Gala, known across the coalfield as the Big Meeting. For a band that carries a colliery’s name, it is one of the most important days of the year.
A gathering of the coalfield
The Gala was first held in 1871. Mining communities march through the city behind their lodge banners, with brass bands playing as they go, before gathering on the Racecourse by the River Wear. The pits have gone, but the Gala has not: it remains a celebration of the communities that coal built and of the music that grew up with them.
Backworth at the Gala
Backworth’s own pits were in the Northumberland coalfield, but the band’s archive records it playing at the Gala through the decades, including the years after the last Backworth pit, the Eccles, closed in 1980. As mining employment disappeared and the band became a community organisation, the Gala stayed one of the fixed points in its calendar, alongside Whit Friday, CISWO events and regional contests.
The band played at the Gala in 2015 and 2016, in 2023, and again this year on 11 July 2026.
Why it still matters
Colliery bands were at the heart of life in the pit villages, and the Gala is where that tradition is still most visible. Playing in Durham each July connects today’s players, who come from every walk of life, with the mining community the band grew out of in 1886.
See more photographs from the Gala in our gallery.