C ORBY’S STEELWORKS once gave the Northamptonshire town a ready supply of jobs as well as a generous dusting of soot. Like thousands of Scotsmen, Billy Dalziel’s grandfather moved from Glasgow to find work in the plant. His elder brother was one of more than 100 apprentices taken on each year. But the good times ended, most of the works shut and 10,000 workers lost their jobs in 1980. By the time Mr Dalziel went away to university, Corby was a byword for decline. “That’s the unemployment town,” he was told.

Yet Corby is now booming again. Its population has risen by 30% since 2001, to a little under 70,000, and is predicted to grow by just shy of a third in the next two decades. Only the London borough of Tower Hamlets is likely to outpace it. Workmen are back at the site of the former ironworks, digging up the infill that buried the town’s industrial past to lay the foundations for 5,000 new homes. A statue of a steelworker stands outside the Corby Cube, a shiny new block of council facilities and offices, in a nod to the town’s heritage.

The transformation is partly a result of good fortune. The steelworks left plenty of brownfield land that could be snapped up by developers, outside the wide circles of “green belt” that restrict development around nearby cities. Its location also helps. It is 70 miles (113km) north of London, but a train line that opened in 2009 put it within just over an hour of the capital. Commuters soon moved in, attracted by house prices 60% lower than the London average. One of the newcomers, Mohammad Khan, had never heard of Corby before his wife came across its cheap homes online. They swapped a two-bedroom home on the fringes of London for four bedrooms and a garden. They are both freelancers who can work remotely. “Nowadays you can be anywhere,” he says. Soon after moving in, he helped to raise funds for the town’s first mosque.

Its location has also attracted logistics and food-processing companies, which are keen for sites close to the centre of England. Eddie Stobart, a haulage firm, leased a new depot in 2018. These new jobs, and work building new homes, have brought in eastern Europeans. Immigrants account for a little less than half of the population growth, according to an analysis by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a think-tank. In 2016 18% of Corby’s population was foreign-born, four percentage points higher than the British average.

Local politicians have made the most of these advantages. The borough council is “markedly more interventionist” than its peers, reckons Nigel Hugill of Urban & Civic, a developer which owns a 965-acre site in the town. When Corby was designated an “enterprise zone” in the 1980s, the council distributed copies of The Ecorbyist, a spoof of this newspaper highlighting rate exemptions for firms that moved in. One firm lured to Corby, RS Components, is now the borough’s biggest employer.