It's a social challenge that we still haven't worked out how to meet. Prior to the industrial revolution there were small rural communities, hamlets, villages, and towns, in places which grew up to be coal towns. But when the single economic driver disappears we don't know how to scale these communities back down.

I've always moved to where the work is, and I see the much same in my family tree all the way back to the industrial revolution (including mining engineers and mining machinery makers on my fathers side, who don't seem to have spent more than 10-20 years in any one coal field). But I know that many people are much more rooted in place. Forcing people to move isn't palatable in the U.K., but waiting for communities to disintegrate and people to move out on there own seems equally cruel