Corby Town Centre

Summary

A Scottish steel-town transplant in Northamptonshire — a new town expanded to house steelworkers in the 1930s-60s, with a Scottish community, a post-war town centre, and the East Midlands ironstone landscape.

About this location

Corby is a new town in Northamptonshire expanded dramatically from the 1930s onwards when Stewarts and Lloyds built the steel tube works here, recruiting heavily from Scotland. The Scottish community in Corby — around 30% of the population of Scottish descent at its peak — gave Corby a cultural identity unlike any comparable English industrial town, earning the informal title “the Scottiest town in England.”

The steel works closed in 1980; Corby was subsequently designated a Development Corporation new town and rebuilt with 1980s-90s commercial and residential development. The town centre is post-war and early-1960s in character — the original modernist civic layout of the new town survives around Corporation Street and George Street.

For productions, Corby gives a specific combination: the Scottish cultural community in a Midlands new town, the post-war new town commercial architecture, and the ironstone landscape (the characteristic orange-brown ironstone of Northamptonshire) in the surrounding countryside. North Northamptonshire Council handles filming permits.