The Model Village is a figure-of-eight shaped housing estate, designed to utopian ideals by architect Percy B. Houfton, and built in 1895 for the families of workers at Cresswell Colliery in the northernmost corner of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. The first piece of footage was shot at the colliery by a miner weeks before the closure of the pit in 1991, the second in 2000 by artist-to-be Catherine Hunter and her uncle Paul, who lived in the Model at the time.
Ten years on, in 2010, and the histories of the two films have become curiously intertwined, thanks to a chance meeting in Cresswell station cafe. Their disparate intentions are long obselete, separated by a decade of steady decline on the estate, and neither is descriptive of the place as it is now. Nonetheless, the two films resonate with an elusive truth and clearly belong together somehow. 'The Model' investigates their shared history.
