to Scanthorpe, bastion of steel, respite for threatened stoves – Liberation

SCUTHORPE is one of those cities that lives in the past, without a new building which is possible to boast. Even the contemporary art gallery has set up in an old church, at the foot of the three aging housing towers that mark the limit of the center-a handful of pedestrian streets flanked by closed shops and fast-food chains. This city in the north-eastern England is entirely turned towards the neighboring steelworks and lives to the rhythm of its stove highs, but also of its crises.

Here, the football club is called The Iron (« iron ») and the employees of British Steel were used to saying that « Paradise reflects the fruit of their work », These nights of big weather when the incandescent metal lit the clouds from below. Tony Gosling remembers orange reflections on the walls of her child’s bedroom, rotten egg smells and noises that heard at miles around. “In the street where I grew up, everyone worked in steel, apart from the priest. If we met someone whose parents did something else, it was weird … «  Tells the trade unionist, in shorts in all time, to clear his two tattoos on the calves: that of the club SCUTHORPE United and the English red coat of arms with three lions.

The month of May 2025 could have made a brutal end for the site of British Steel (one of the branches from the privatization of the sector under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s). Bought in 2020