A friend of mine sent me a copy of Rosemary Wakeman's book on modern utopias. I had never realised that I grew up in large part in one, but, well, Corby is included and I still love it in my memory, so here is the extract. The full book itself is very interesting. “The new town of Corby in the English Midlands is a more detailed example of how designation as a new town played out. Corby was located near England’s largest supply of accessible ironstone and also the coalfields in Yorkshire and Durham. Mining rights and steel production were owned by the Stewarts and Lloyds Company. By the mid-1930s, the town was budding into a premier steelworks and steel tube-making centre. Thousands poured into the sleepy village of fifteen hundred souls, especially young Scottish workers from the Clyde Valley. Ten years later, in 1945, Corby was a boomtown of twelve thousand people, its steel mills churning out war materiel, including the steel tubes used in the cross-channel pipeline supplyin...
This is a collection of personal and largely unedited observations covering the years from 2006 to now; I assert my copyright but am fine with links and footnotes. Some posts are obviously much more researched than others, and any errors are wholly mine except where I have innocently disseminated or linked to other bloggers or commentators.