"I'll tell you what really annoyed us miners," said Pete Mansell, sipping a pint of John Smith's on Monday. "She said we were the enemy within. We weren't. We were just looking after our lives, our families, our kids and our properties, everything that we ever had. We were fighting for that big style."

Along with most of the other men drinking in the Black Bull pub in Aughton, Rotherham, the 55-year-old former pit worker had borne witness to the fiercest confrontation in the miners strike at the nearby Orgreave coking plant on 18 June 1984.

Almost 30 years have gone by since Margaret Thatcher characterised those who took part in the "battle of Orgreave" as thugs. But in a village that one drinker said had been "decimated by Thatcher", the words still cut deep. It is perhaps no surprise that those gathered in the pub were having what they described as a party after hearing about her death.

"I'm not a hypocrite," said Mansell, who is from the nearby pit village of Swallownest and worked underground for 22 years. "I spoke ill of her when she was alive and I'll speak ill of her now she's dead. She doesn't mean two iotas to me."

Chris Whitley, 56, who sold tobacco on the picket line, said he was in the pub to "celebrate – course we are. She killed these villages." He said families had been torn apart by the strike – brothers still refusing to speak to each other, unable to forgive the sibling who crossed the picket line while the other struggled by on strike wages for a year or more.

"Scabby bastards," said one drinker, declining to give his name for fear of reopening old family wounds.

Whitley said he was thinking of getting t-shirts printed saying "Thatcher's in hell – she's only been there a few hours and she's already closed down the furnaces". Propping up the bar, the men compared text messages they'd received throughout the day. A typical example: "I enjoy a good swim. But if someone asked me what my favourite stroke was I'd say Maggie Thatcher's." Another proudly brandished a text message he'd received just after 1pm saying simply: "Parteeeeee time."

All were convinced that the truth about the brutal Orgreave Operation has yet to emerge. Much bitterness remains about the demonisation of those present on the day. The subsequent legal proceedings received barely a fraction of the attention devoted to the events on the day, which were widely characterised as an attack on South Yorkshire police by the miners.

There were 95 miners arrested at Orgreave and prosecuted for riot, a charge that carried the potential for a long prison sentence up to a maximum of life. But a year later, on 17 July 1985, all 95 were acquitted. The prosecution withdrew, from the first trial of 15, after police gave unconvincing accounts in the witness box: it became clear that the miners had themselves been attacked by police on horses or with truncheons, and there was evidence that a police officer's signature on a statement had been forged.

Michael Mansfield QC, who represented three of the accused Orgreave miners in that trial, said afterwards it was "The biggest frame up ever."

He and the miners argued that they had been set up at Orgreave, ushered deliberately to a field where the confrontation would take place on the police's terms. They have always said they were behaving largely peacefully, when riot squad officers and police on horseback charged them. They argue that any stone throwing or violence after that were futile attempts to protect themselves.

Mansell remembered the battle vividly. He recalled a crucial turning point in the day when ambulances approached the picket line. "We opened up to let them through – course we did, we were respectful people," he said. "But when the ambulances got to the other side, police got out from the ambulances, they attacked us with truncheons from one side and the horses from the other side. We got absolutely hammered."

These days the Orgreave plant has disappeared. The vast site is currently being developed in a £100m regeneration project. Rising from the somewhat bleak wasteland is the half-finished Waverley housing estate. Opposite it, just up from a huge Morrisons supermarket, is an ambitious development called the Advanced Manufacturing Park, which houses high-tech local businesses.

Civic life is not in abundance. When the Guardian stopped to ask a local man if this was Orgreave, he said simply: "It's supposed to be." It's not just the pits which have gone, said Mansell, who worked underground at the Treeton colliery for 22 years. But with it the "camaraderie, the community spirit – the sense that we were all looking out for each other." He believes Thatcher didn't just destroy his village and many others like it, but also paved the way for the political climate of today.

"It was class war," he said. "The people above didn't want us to win. The people with money didn't want us to win. If we had won, they wouldn't be able to get away with what they are doing now, cutting benefits for disabled people and things like that. The unions would have stopped them. But we lost."