Inside Corby, the new town that lost 10,000 jobs ...Middle East

“My family moved here from Edinburgh when I was a kid,” explains David Hadden while standing behind the counter in his butcher’s shop in Corby’s old village.

“When people came down from Scotland, they couldn’t believe that they got given a house and a job. They moved away from the mines and the uncertainty of Scotland’s own steel industry.”

In the 1930s, it was Scots who migrated to the town in their thousands in something of a “steel rush”, leading to Corby’s nickname “Little Scotland”.

Hadden’s family butchers sells scotch pies, tattie scones, haggis and other specially imported products from north of the border. He and his wife Lorraine, are the descendants of people who moved south when the Glasgow-based steelmaking firm Stewart and Lloyds relocated here in 1932 in search of work and, crucially, housing which the steelworkers were given.

In 1946, the New Towns Act created development corporations with sweeping planning and government powers to expand towns like Corby across the country, making space for a growing population, infrastructure and industry. By 1950, Corby’s population had grown from 1,500 to 18,000.

However, since steel manufacturing ceased in Corby 35 years ago, resulting in the loss of more than 10,000 jobs and pushing the town’s unemployment level to 30 per cent, Corby has had to search for a new identity.

Every year, the Highland Gathering festival still takes place in Corby. David and Lorraine remember that it used to be “massive, a three-day event” when it was sponsored by the steelworks. “Now the council don’t give it any money,” David says. “Everything has just gradually been scaled back.”

Like other post-war new towns, so much of Corby’s culture and society revolved around industry. It’s not just jobs that were lost when the steelworks closed, the Haddens say, but a sense of community too.

In the centre of town, surrounded by a brutalist mid-century concrete shopping centre, some of the original stone signage from the Stewart and Lloyds steelworks has been relocated from the factory site as a monument to Corby’s founding industry. Lorraine says she walked past it recently and “suddenly felt emotional”.

Deindustrialisation, the Haddens are clear, has completely changed Corby. And not necessarily for the better.

“They’ve tried to do a regeneration scheme here,” David says. “All the factories around here were given special rates – cheap rent.” These factories, which include food processing plants, a flour milling facility and a manufacturing plant which specialises in plastic injection moulding, are all located around Corby’s northern border. The old Stewart and Lloyds steelworks is just to the west, and what’s left of steel manufacturing here is operated by Indian multinational Tata.

It’s coming up for lunch time and a queue is forming outside the Haddens’ shop as people order chicken breasts (which David proudly notes are cheaper than in the supermarket) and, of course, the Scotch pies which have been freshly baked today.

The movement of Scottish residents to Corby may have changed the course of this town’s history, but it was not to be its last experience of internal economic migration from elsewhere in the UK.

Corby is just north of Northampton in the East Midlands and is in a prime position. It forms part of a Midlands triangle with Leicester and Peterborough, a stone’s throw from Kettering and around 72 miles north of London.

In recent years, Corby has been increasingly seen as a London commuter town. People have left the capital in search of cheaper housing and landed here, drawn in by its relative proximity to London (a 1-hour 10-min train from King’s Cross).

It’s easy to see the appeal, as the Haddens’ daughter 33-year-old Danielle puts it, “the fact that you can get almost anywhere in the country easily”, whether that’s the North of England, Glastonbury Festival which she just went to with her friends or Luton airport (just 49 minutes on the London-bound train) makes it a great place to be.

The average house price in Corby is £241,017, which is below the national average, and the median rent for a three-bedroom home is £1,200 a month. In London, you’ll struggle to rent a family-sized home for less than £2,000-£2,500 a month, even in more affordable areas. By Corby’s commuter station, a brand new build-to-rent development is advertised on billboards.

Indeed, David says he has recently hired a young butcher who left east London with his girlfriend because they could not afford rent.

If David and Lorraine had one serious complaint, it would be about Corby’s town centre. Like so many towns across Britain, the high street here has struggled. TK Maxx remains, but some other shops are shuttered; local restaurants have closed and though there are a few independent cafes, most of what remains is major chains and discount stores.

“The town centre has gone downhill in my estimation,” David says. Lorraine agrees: “Back in the day, everyone went into town, but now it’s all big supermarkets surrounding us, and lots of the little local shops have gone. “There’s a Primark!” a gentleman in the queue pipes up. David and Lorraine laugh.

Labour trade unionist Lee Barron was elected as the MP for Corby in 2024, winning the seat from the Conservatives.

Barron says that one of the first things he wanted to do was get the people responsible for the “regeneration” of Corby together.

The “regeneration” schemes, which the Haddens and their customers are less than impressed by, took place in the 2010s amid much fanfare. Willow Place shopping centre was a £40m attempt to rebrand the town centre as a shopping destination in 2007, hosting “big names” like New Look and River Island, which have both now closed.

Nearby are the £20m Corby international swimming pool and Savoy cinema. The pool, which was touted as a training centre for the London 2012 Olympic Games, is now beloved by residents. It was funded by Corby Borough Council (CBC) in partnership with English Partnership, the East Midlands Development Agency, the Department of Local Government and North Northants Development Company.

“A few months ago, I hosted a roundtable with the people who dealt with the regeneration of Corby. The vision was driven by certain individuals under the last government, and I got them together to see whether it had gone right or wrong,” Barron says.

The upshot, in Barron’s view, is that all of the above “attracted a lot of inward investment” for Corby and marketed the town as “North Londonshire”, but failed to really do what the original post-war planners did and think about how to join the town’s infrastructure, community, amenities and jobs together.

Indeed, the heavy reliance of many councils, like Corby’s, on retail and consumerism to fuel regeneration has proven to be a fallible approach which has been rapidly undone by both inflation and one-click online shopping.

“Corby was built on steel,” Barron says. “The town has had to come back from a huge loss, dust itself down and get back up again. We need jobs here, yes, but we need to make sure we get decent and secure jobs.”

Of particular interest to Barron is the fact that Nike are building their UK HQ in Corby. Magna Park Corby will be a “state-of-the-art” 1.3 million sq ft UK logistics centre, a national supply chain hub for the sportswear brand, which, they say, will be the “principal heart of its UK supply chain operations”.

Barron, however, does not just want big names for the sake of having them. “Nike is a world-class name, yes,” he says, “but we want world-class jobs here. We need to build a local economy based on secure work. I don’t want zero-hour jobs.”

“In terms of Nike, the jobs I mean when I say secure and decent are jobs that people can build a future and family around,” Barron adds.

Recent attempts to “regenerate” Corby were more cosmetic than pragmatic. They were not future-proofed. This suggests that Barron is right to be rigorous about ensuring the town’s longevity and not look for quick fixes.

Today, while unemployment is nowhere near the levels that it was in the 1990s here, Corby is still blighted by higher levels of deprivation than other places in England, with 30 per cent of areas ranking among the most deprived in the country.

The Haddens’ daughter, Danielle, still lives in Corby in the house her grandparents originally moved into when they came down from Scotland.

“Most of my friends from school still live here,” Danielle says over a drink in the town centre, “and that’s the great thing about this community. But I do feel like Corby has an unfair reputation for being a rough place.”

Danielle did not go to university. She commutes to Northampton every day, where she works in finance for a large cleaning company which services Corby’s factories. Before that, she worked in a beauty salon, but she moved because she wanted a more stable income.

Despite finding that, however, she worries that she still cannot afford to buy a home of her own on an annual salary of £29,000 yet.

“I love Corby and the Highland Gathering is an incredible institution where generations come together, but I just wish the council had supported more local, independent businesses to stay in the town,” Danielle says, “it’s really sad – none of the restaurants that used to be here are here now. There are more chains.”

A few years ago, Danielle and her mum tried to open a tea rooms in Corby, but the rent became too expensive. “It’s so much harder for a small business to run these days, I know that’s a Corby problem and a national problem,” Danielle explains, “but I wish it were easier for people to do things in their community.”

Less openly talked about but alluded to over and over again when I chat to members of Corby’s original migrant population in pubs or cafes is the fact that workers have also moved here from Eastern Europe. They staff Corby’s cafes and factories, and some of those who came down from Scotland seem to associate these newcomers with the town’s decline, even though there is no evidence of that.

In one independent town centre coffee shop, the Eastern European owner declines to be interviewed while I drink my tea.

Danielle, however, notes that one of her best friends from the beauty salon is the daughter of migrants from Romania, and Danielle is clear that Corby has a “more the merrier” spirit.

And therein lies the rub for Corby, like so many of Britain’s original new towns. It is a place built around an industry that took the town’s economic heart out when it left. The challenge for Britain’s new Labour Government is working out what will get places like Corby beating again without resorting to short-term fixes that would not last the test of time.

Before I leave, I have a coffee and speak to the manager of the restaurant where I buy it. She’s 27 and recently moved here from London with her mum from Croydon. Before getting a management job in hospitality, she worked in one of Corby’s warehouses.

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“We couldn’t afford London rent anymore,” she explains. “I hated it here at first, but now I really like it.”

This young woman enjoys swimming in Corby’s massive 50-metre pool and going to the Qube for the odd cocktail, but, beyond that, she concedes, “there isn’t a lot for young people to do”.

A spokesperson for North Northamptonshire Council said they were committed to “the vibrancy” of Corby and “ensuring that Corby’s regeneration is forward-looking”.

“We have helped Corby transform in recent years, supported by a £19.9m investment from the UK Government’s Towns Fund, announced in 2021,” they said. “This funding is being used to deliver four key projects aimed at revitalising the town centre and improving connectivity, sustainability, and community infrastructure.”

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