Steeltown

Here I stand with my own kin/At the end of everything/Finally the dream has gone/I’ve nothing left to hang upon/I came here with all my friends/Leaving behind the wait of years/Leaving alone in a flood of tears…

 (…from ‘Steeltown’ by the band Big Country: a song about the effects of the closure of the Stewart and Lloyds steel plant in Corby. It topped the UK charts in 1984.)

 

 

                                               Church of the Epiphany: Central Corby

There are lots of men in shorts on the end of dog leads by Great Oakley’s Village Hall, and it’s not particularly warm. But in June perhaps it just feels wrong to take the morning constitutional in trousers. There’s an unseasonal scent of woodsmoke in the air too, but the temperature’s good for a town stroll, warm but not oppressive. Not so many eggs frying on the pavements today.

 With Northampton, Wellingborough, and Kettering behind me on the Big Walk, once I’ve beaten Corby’s bounds, there’ll only be Peterborough to go in terms of major conurbations. I strike out on a cycle path beside the dual carriageway with the railway station in my sights. Corby owes a lot to William Holford and the work of its Development Corporation, back in the days when thought was given to the wider welfare of the citizenry beyond providing everyone with four bedrooms and a titchy back yard. The cycle path snakes between wide grass verges putting distance between itself and the traffic, although I see at least one cyclist perversely ploughing along against the wind, mixing it with the container lorries and petrol tankers. Rather her than me. There are about 60,000 inhabitants of the town, compared with the 1600 there were in the nineteen twenties, but walking around it, one gets a rather better idea of exactly how much land has to be flattened and tamed in order that a population of such a size can live comfortably. The answer is…a lot.

 I come to Corby with prejudices. When Sue and I first became Midlanders, the place had a tough reputation. Venturing the possibility that one might go and teach there drew an intake of breath and sucking of teeth from fellow teaching professionals. As a twenty-six year old I went for an interview at one of its comprehensive schools, supported for a prestigious post as Head of Boys Pastoral Care by one of the LEA advisers. The panel more or less offered me the job. I temporised. They appointed someone else, and the LEA adviser was far from amused. I’d panicked, you see, unsure I could cope in that environment, with unemployment and anger in the air. Maybe I was right not to dip a toe in the hot water. Sir Keith Joseph announced the closure of Stewart and Lloyd’s in 1979. It became an unhappy place.

 You know the story of how the Corby workforce was recruited from Scotland in the 1930s, and how haggis eating, Scottish country dancing, bagpipes, accordions and men called Jimmy became commonplace slap bang in the middle of Northamptonshire. I wonder, will I hear Scottish accents on the streets today? Nope. I’m listening carefully, but hear only conventional TV English, a smattering of Northamptonshire vernacular, quite a lot of Eastern European, but nothing to remind me of the Krankies, Billy Connolly or Nicola Sturgeon.

                                               Open for business in Corby village (and selfie)

 Just past the railway station by a roundabout on the edge of Corby village, and opposite a shed which offers live music and tattoos, sits ancient St. John’s Church, its exterior looking a little ravaged. I walk around it, and then see Paul Frost, the vicar, unloading cassock and surplice from his car. I say hello. Paul, tanned, fit and youthful looking, was once a youth worker at Moulton, but after some time in Kettering, he’s been the incumbent here for seven and a half years. There used to be a second church in the benefice, at the Church of the Epiphany in the ‘new’ town centre, but the congregation there was struggling, and Paul tells me it’s now been re-opened as a gym, with a chapel attached. He encourages me to go and have a look. I say I will. (Later on, I look up Paul’s name on the web and find an Anglia TV report from 2015 which runs the headline: ‘Cage fighting vicar hosts classes at former church…’  Well, as I say, Paul looks jolly fit – and I say this with respect from one former R.E. teacher to another – but the content of the report nowhere establishes that he actually does any cage-fighting himself on a regular basis. That’s the Press for you!)

 Corby has always had a rep as a rather physical place, from well before the arrival of the tartan army. Every twenty years there’s a tradition of holding a Pole Fair ( the next one is due in 2022). This once involved a lot of rumble-tumble misrule whereby pairs of marauding yokels trapped unsuspecting/naïve/ignorant inhabitants, then hoisted them up on a pole before dumping them in the stocks, to be freed on payment of a fine. So that’s a note to self: avoid Corby Village any time in 2022.

 The town centre is on a rise past Coronation Park from today’s angle of attack. My approach is disturbed by a gentleman with Tourette’s or some similar affliction who’s coming up rapidly behind me at the pace of an Olympic 20km race walker, yelling obscenities loudly and angrily, but alternating this with an impassioned request for help. I take cover by the corner of the Church of the Epiphany, and thinking of innocent bystanders stabbed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, let him pass.

 I explain myself to the chap on the front desk of the erstwhile church, and he leads me through the gym to the small chapel at its side. I pray, and look through the windows at what’s going on, amazed, and to be honest, aghast. I don’t do this stuff, never have, and even to be in the vicinity of that environment, I regress to the terrors of P.E. lessons in the gym at school. Press-ups? Can’t do those. Rope-climbing? Not a hope. Squat thrusts? You’ve got to be kidding me. At least everyone present today is obeying the notice on the walls which injuncts against toplessness. A splendid looking chap who looks as if he has his Harley parked outside is doing terrifying things to his chest with weights and pulleys. The sheer amount of tech inside the place is staggering, a vast array from the heavy metal design book dedicated to the tearing in half of dictionaries. Stop it, Vince.  Enough already of the purple, sub-Bill Bryson prose. This is an appropriate, clever initiative to show that Christians are concerned with the whole person, and that we’re there to meet people on their own patch, immersed in their own concerns, as Jesus would have done. Good stuff, a model, and food for thought.

 

Back outside I walk down to where I can see another church marked on the map. It’s a URC, and as I reach it the man with Tourette’s comes past me in the opposite direction, still effing and blinding. My heart is stirred. I wish I could reach out and heal him as if I was Jesus. But I’m not and I can’t. Who will help him?

 

The town centre in Corby is much, much smarter than I remember it. A couple of decades ago I stopped off to see what it was like, and came away saddened. Now, although some of the sixties’ shops are showing their age, the place is quite bright and perky. And for 20p the town centre toilets are the cleanest I’ve seen anywhere, full stop. Still no Scottish accents though. I think I notice that more people smoke in Corby than other places I go – casually on the street, outside banks, hanging out the doors of bars. I eat a sandwich in the sunshine and then move on up towards Occupation Road. There I find a Romanian deli and the Catholic church of Our Lady of Walsingham. I cross over past a water tower into an estate of workers’ houses from the thirties’ boomtown, brick built, careful and solid, reminding me of a mini Hampstead Garden Suburb. These were not erected, as one suspects a lot of comparable modern housing is, on a principle of ‘built-in obsolescence’: they were made to last.

 

 

 

 Further along I come to the copper-roofed church of St. Columba and the Northern Saints on Studfall Avenue, whose architect, it seems to me, was nodding at Sir Basil Spence’s design for Coventry Cathedral. St. John’s apart, many of the places of worship in Corby have something of a common style – and to my mind this is one of the more distinguished. The website looks promising too, showing apparent engagement in the Street Pastors scheme, as well as linking to the local food bank. It comes to me that for all their same-i-ness, at least the mid-20^th century developers allowed for churches in their plans. Fat chance these days.

 

                                                            Thoroughsale Wood

 

Over the road, the theme of today’s walk continues. The Development Corporation left Corby a legacy of good open spaces, and I enjoy the early summer greenery of Thoroughsale Wood very much. The path is beautifully maintained and buggyable, and even the undergrowth at its sides has been trimmed back and the grass cut, so that the walker feels safe in this remnant of ancient Rockingham Forest. Are those in charge of Corby simply better at running their town than, say Northampton’s leaders? Or do they have access to targeted regeneration funds? What has been the benefit to Corby to have been part of the EU, and, sobering thought, is it destined to return to decline over the next decade yet again, as presumably, we leave?

                                                       

                                                       St. Ninian's: Church of Scotland, Corby

On through the Beanfield area of town, past another Catholic church, some Baptists, another Wee Free hall, St Ninian’s Church of Scotland (Ah!) and St. Peter and St. Andrew’s C. of E.. St. Ninian’s gets the prize for the prettiest spire. The food bank is run from St. Peter and St. Andrew’s. I go round the back of the church hoping someone’s at home, so I can find out who uses their facilities, but I guess this is a programme which runs most sensibly in the mornings, so the door’s locked.

A little further on I take a breather on a pub bench. There’s a chap sitting on another seat ten metres away, leaning on a walking trolley. He hails me, and tells me that kitted out the way I am I shouldn’t be taking my ease: it’s not fair!  And lo and behold, he does this in an unmistakeably Scots accent. I laugh, and say I’ve been walking all day and he’s the first Scotsman I’ve met. Ay, he replies, a lot of people think that, but actually I come from Wales, near Merthyr Tydfil. This is Malcolm aka Budgie. His dad was a miner and as the coal industry declined – and perhaps for better wages and conditions – moved his family including the ten-year old Budgie to Corby. Budgie is 68 now. He has chronic asthma and his back is broken after life as a bin man. I guess he may have worked in steel in his early days. There have been other health problems along the way, but Budgie is determined to wring the most from every day. He is Corby personified, and I am moved.

Today and tomorrow they’re holding the 75^th anniversary commemoration of D-Day. It makes the tears flow to listen to some of the accounts of sacrifice made for the sake of freedom. Corby played an important part in the weeks after the initial invasion. The steel tubing produced here was crucial in allowing the rapid laying of communications under the Channel: the employment of what was at that time leading-edge technology in a moment of absolute crisis.

 How can it be that we are simultaneously celebrating this one-ness with Europe in being freed from the shackles of Fascism, while half our nation are gloating at the prospect of economic and political isolation? I despair. And if you are a Brexiteer, beg you to think again.

 

‘Here I stand with my own kin/At the end of everything/Finally the dream has gone/I’ve nothing left to hang upon…'

 Rory’s reasons* : 15.5 km. 4.25 hrs. 18 deg. Sun and cloud. No stiles, gates or bridges. Three C. of E. churches (four if you count Church of the Epiphany). Only the latter open. The genuine tartan-wearing, sporran-sporting Scotsperson elusive to the last.

 

·        Rory Stewart is an interesting oddball candidate for the Tory leadership: the only one to say the Emperor of No-deal Brexit has no clothes. I shouldn’t think he stands a cat in hell’s chance, but he almost makes me think I could vote Conservative…

 Father

I thank you again for the sacrifices
That have been made for me.
Help me never to undervalue
What it cost my parents
And grandparents
And those of their generation
Who died in the service of freedom.

I thank you for the times

When our country and peoples
Have acknowledged you
And striven to do your will
In public and private.
I pray that we
In our time
May find the courage and discernment
To promote your Kingdom
On our planet.
Amen.