The town that choked on smoke and noxious waste
POLLUTED: Corby steel works at full steam
Only fools or innocents walked alone down Stephenson Way. That’s where the hard kids lived.
There was a gang of them, six or eight-strong, and they didn’t much like strangers on their manor.
I had a passport of sorts, a school friend who lived there. The view from his house was incredible.
At the bottom of his garden was a railway line and on the other side – 70 or perhaps 100 yards away – were the blast furnaces of Corby’s steel works.
You could feel the heat just standing there by his Dad’s rose bushes.
Smoke and noxious waste gases belched from the top. Showers of sparks provided a light show day and night.
And at the foot of these colossal black structures a little river of molten, glowing pig iron ran down a gully, carefully tended by men in long leather aprons and the kind of face masks that welders wear.
The iron would be taken away to be turned into steel in Bessemer converters elsewhere in the Stewarts and Lloyds plant.
To me, the view from that friend’s garden was a vision of hell. To my friend’s father, it was a comforting sight. This was his livelihood; this was how he put food on the table for his family.
I offer this background because I have been watching a new Netflix drama called Toxic Town concerning a court battle started by mothers whose children had birth defects, which they put down to poisonous waste.
The mothers claimed it was released when the local council hurriedly cleared the site of the steelworks, which had closed years earlier after it ceased to be profitable.
Corby was always a toxic town – ask anyone who pegged washing to the line when it was a booming industrial centre. By the time it was dry, it would often be marked with sooty stains from the foul waste that was an inevitable by-product of steel making.
Why did we live in this poisonous haze? Well, the answer goes all the way back to the 1930s, when Stewarts and Lloyds, knowing that the rolling fields surrounding Corby concealed 500 million tons of iron ore, decided to expand their steel plant.
They did not have enough workers locally with the skills and experience to make steel, so they recruited from Clydeside, where the industry was contracting. And so thousands of Scots came to live in what, until recently, had been a rural village.
Before the company built 2,000 new homes for its workers, it asked them: Where do you want to live – right beside the job, or in the lovely surrounding countryside?
The Scots were hardened city dwellers. Back came the answer: Next to the job.
The Scots brought with them their language (English, but not as we know it, Jimmy), their culture, their food and their capacity to work hard and play even harder. It was a raucous, gobby, working class place to grow up in.
Vans would drive through the night to bring delicacies such as Scotch pies, made from spiced mutton in hot water pastry, Scottish morning rolls and of course haggis. The Glasgow Herald and the Daily Record came too.
Burns Night and Hogmanay were wild celebrations of the old country. There were competitions every year for the best pipe bands and to see which local glutton could force down the most haggis in a given time.
It was life in the raw, and the cast of Toxic Town – led by Dr Who’s Jodie Whittaker – have got that bit spot on.
We are told that Toxic Town is “based on a true story”. Just how true is a matter for debate.
There is no doubt that the kernel of the story is accurate. After the steel works was pulled down, Corby borough council was left with 680 acres of land in the centre of town that they needed to redevelop.
Without its industry, the town was dying. They had to act fast.
Stewarts and Lloyds dealt with the worst of its waste – zinc, arsenic, boron and nickel among other hazards – by storing safely it in pits. But these poison dumps were left behind in the demolition process and made the land unfit for any new use.
The council took money from Government and regeneration bodies and between 1984 and 1999 set about a clean-up.
But as so often with local government, it was a cock-up. The waste was moved through the town by fleets of lorries.
Two hundred journeys a day ferried the foul mess to a quarry where it would be re-buried. There were few safety measures. Sludge spilled on to the roads, dust flew into the air, landing on houses, gardens, markets.
One expert described it as “an atmospheric soup of toxic materials”.
Pregnant women in the affected areas breathed in the muck or ingested it by eating contaminated vegetables. They were two and a half times more likely to deliver babies with birth defects.
Some did and at first they blamed themselves. Their children had undeveloped fingers or malformed feet. The disabilities would change their lives and as the scandal unfolded their mothers came to realise what had really happened.
They banded together to bring a class action alleging that the disabilities were caused by toxic waste dumped by the council. It was a landmark case, the first in the world to establish a direct link between toxic waste in the atmosphere and birth defects.
The court case was known as the British Erin Brockovich, after the American lawyer and activist who won a famous environmental judgment. Hollywood made a film of it and Brockovich was played by Julia Roberts.
The legal process took 18 Corby families 10 years before they got it to the High Court. David Wilby, KC, for the families, claimed that the council paid councillors’ friends and former workmates to dispose of the waste.
Police investigated the corruption allegations but the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was not enough evidence to proceed.
Not so in the Netflix version of events. A large part of the story concerns backhanders to cowboy lorry firms, with bent councillors covering up the evidence.
It’s great telly and even manages some humour among the grim subject matter – watch it if you can. But it’s not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
The council eventually settled with the families. The terms were secret but they reportedly got almost £15 million between them.
*****
The first thing you notice is that enigmatic smile. Then there’s the way her eyes follow you around the room.
No, don’t be silly, I’m not talking about Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th Century masterpiece, the Mona Lisa.
There’s a new(ish) girl in town who seems to have stolen the identity of da Vinci’s model, thought to have been Italian noblewoman Lisa del Giocondo.
Yalda Hakim is a journalist and presenter for Sky News. She was born in Afghanistan and arrived in Australia as a six-month-old refugee after her parents fled the Soviet-Afghan war.
She trained there as a journalist and then moved to London to work for the BBC. Hakim was poached by Sky and now presents The World With Yalda Hakim, a primetime show that precedes the News at Ten and is said to have an audience of about 60,000 a night.
She’s good: Authoritative, with perceptive questions for her guests and, I suspect, sharp elbows. You might have seen her sitting right beside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky when he gave his Press conference before flying home from London talks.
But when Sky does that split-screen thing as she listens to guests’ answers, you could be standing in the Louvre among jostling, snap-happy tourists, staring at a billion-dollar Renaissance painting behind bullet-proof glass.
*****
If, at the close of business each evening, I myself can understand what I've written, I feel the day hasn't been totally wasted. – S J Perelman
RICHARD DISMORE
4 March 2025
