‘The Underground Sea’ brings together texts by John Berger on mineworkers and miners’ strikes. The collection includes new transcripts and image-essay of his rarely seen BBC programme, ‘Germinal’; a new transcript of a moving interview made in 1963 and his essay ‘Miners’. Berger’s ‘Germinal’ places itself in the heart of a Derbyshire mining village, with reflections on the everyday life of a typical pit community. Berger grapples with the politics of witness as he studies the miners’ labour and the wider community shaped in service to this work.