Acclaimed This Is England director Shane Meadows will create a new Cragg Vale Coiners series for the BBC set in West Yorkshire.
Best known for the This Is England series, he is one of the UK’s most celebrated directors with further credits for film Dead Man’s Shoes and TV series The Virtues.
He will be adapting Benjamin Myers novel The Gallows Pole, which fictionalises the story of David Hartley and the Cragg Vale Coiners, for a new BBC series.
The critically acclaimed novel is set during the Industrial Revolution in 18th century West Yorkshire, with filming for the BBC due to take place in Cragg Vale, just south of Mytholmroyd in Calderdale.
The story, based on real-life events, is all about the Yorkshire poor at a time when the theft of a loaf of bread could lead to the gallows. At the time, smuggling and coining – the practice of melting down clippings and turning them into counterfeit money – was common in the area.
It follows Hartley as he assembles his own gang of counterfeiters from local weavers and land-workers, starting a criminal enterprise that would ultimately become the biggest fraud in British history and capsize the economy.
This adaptation will be Meadow’s first foray into period drama.
“The Gallows Pole is an incredible true story, little known outside of Yorkshire, about a group of very naughty men and women who started clipping and counterfeiting coins out in the Moors, as a way to keep themselves and their community alive,” said Meadows.
“I’ve never made a period drama before so I’m absolutely buzzing, and to be doing it with Piers Wenger at the BBC, his incredible team, and Element Pictures is nothing short of an honour.”
Released in 2017 to critical acclaim, Myers novel picked up a Roger Deakin Award and the 2018 Walter Scott Price for historical fiction.
