If you have a Netflix subscription you might have come across Toxic Town, the story of how the contaminated soil from a decommissioned steelworks in the UK led to many cases of developmental abnormalities and the birth of children with affected limbs during the 1990s. The drama focused on the efforts of a dedicated solicitor to expose the lies and deception of those involved, particularly the local council, and told the tale of some of the families most affected. It is not easy to watch, whatever your connection to the story.

For me, it was a story I already knew well, because I grew up in Corby, the town affected, and lived there from 1965 when I was four until I left for university in 1979. While I was at university the steelworks was closed down in the service of a cruel ideology that measured value only in terms of profit, and my mum moved back to the North East, so I never went back to live there after I graduated.

So I wasn’t in Corby when the lorries loaded with toxic topsoil drove through town to the dump, and my children were neither conceived nor born in a house contaminated with heavy metals and the rest of the product of decades of iron and steel production at the works that dominated the town.

But those affected were my contemporaries or near contemporaries, and anyone represented in the programme who spoke with a Glaswegian accent would have grown up in the same streets I did, shopped on Corporation Street and in Queen’s Square, use the swimming pool and boating lake, drunk in the White Hart and the Nag’s Head and (on a bad day) The Corinthian, and taken the bus to Kettering to catch a train to London or Scotland.

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