How Corby became England’s fastest-growing town

CORBY’S STEELWORKS once gave the Northamptonshire town a ready supply of jobs as well as a generous dusting of soot. Like thousands of Scotsmen, Billy Dalziel’s grandfather moved from Glasgow to find work in the plant. His elder brother was one of more than 100 apprentices taken on each year. But the good times ended, most of the works shut and 10,000 workers lost their jobs in 1980. By the time Mr Dalziel went away to university, Corby was a byword for decline. “That’s the unemployment town,” he was told.

Yet Corby is now booming again. Its population has risen by 30% since 2001, to a little under 70,000, and is predicted to grow by just shy of a third in the next two decades. Only the London borough of Tower Hamlets is likely to outpace it. Workmen are back at the site of the former ironworks, digging up the infill that buried the town’s industrial past to lay the foundations for 5,000 new homes. A statue of a steelworker stands outside the Corby Cube, a shiny new block of council facilities and offices, in a nod to the town’s heritage.