The news that a massive storage shed at the former Gascoigne Wood mine is to be brought back into use to store gypsum inevitably sparks memories of the Selby coalfield.

And that in turn sparks memories of the decline and fall of a once-great industry.

In March, it will be 25 years since the start of the 1984 miners’ strike, in which Britain went to war with itself.

The year-long dispute is generally seen as the beginning of the end of large-scale coal mining in Britain. At the start of the 1960s, there were about 700,000 miners in the UK. When the miners’ strike began there were fewer than 200,000. By the end of 2004, the year in which the Selby coalfield closed, that figure was more like 5,000.

Ironically, however, 1984 marked the beginning rather than the end of mining at Selby. Back then, Selby was the UK’s newest coalfield. The first coal from the £1.5 billion complex – which had mines at Wistow, Stillingfleet, Riccall, Whitemoor and North Selby, plus a distribution hub at Gascoigne Wood – had been brought up the year before, and the National Coal Board was promising “jobs for life”.

Then came the strike. The trigger was the announcement that Cortonwood pit, near Barnsley, was to close. By March 12, half of Britain’s 187,000 miners had walked out.

Initially, picket lines at Selby were friendly. Some miners even talked of police bringing cups of tea for the picketing miners. Then came the dispute’s first death – 24-year-old Pontefract miner David Gareth Jones, killed on the picket lines at Ollerton in Nottinghamshire.

In Selby, hardship began to bite. Some families with young children were living on as little as £16 a week state benefits. “Miners are walking around Selby with long faces and hunched-up shoulders,” the then coalfield chaplain, the Rev Gwynne Richardson, said at the time.

The dispute turned really ugly on May 29, when thousands of pickets became involved in a running battle with police outside the Orgreave coking plant near Sheffield. On June 15, violence flared for the first time in Selby. Three van-loads of miners were arrested when they attempted to stop contract workers entering North Selby mine. Then, on July 6, Selby itself was besieged when about 1,000 miners effectively sealed the town off by blockading the toll bridge over the Ouse.

Miners’ leader Arthur Scargill was in Selby himself in August to speak to miners and their families. But by the end of November, the drift back to work by thousands of young miners – many of them men with families to feed – had begun.

It accelerated with the promise of a £1,400 Christmas pay bonanza.

The strike officially ended on March 3, 1985, leaving a lasting legacy of bitterness between miners dubbed “BBCs” – Back Before Christmas – and those who stayed out to the bitter end.

The end of the strike marked boom times for the Selby coalfield, however.

In the mid-1990s, it set new European production records. But problems were discovered with the seam, which UK Coal said made it more costly to mine.

In 2002, the decision was made to close. Gascoigne Wood became the last part of the mining complex to shut down in August, 2004.