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On the Cumbrian coast, Millom was the southernmost of the urban areas that comprised industrial West Cumberland. Along with other iron towns inland, like Cleator Moor, it experienced an unprecedented boom in the mid-19th century, as a result of the speed with which the iron and steel industries took off, leading to ‘striking population changes’ within a very short space of time.
At that time, the rapid growth that had become evident probably seemed to guarantee the town’s future as a ‘little capital of a little mining Kingdom.’ Millom’s hemmed-in position on the Duddon Estuary, looking out in all directions to natural boundaries and inadequate overland communications networks, saw it frequently compared to an island – not unlike its near Atlantic neighbour, the Isle of Man – when it came to the passionate local sense of loyalty that was to be found within its population.
The most well-known product of Millom, besides steel, was the poet Norman Nicholson, ‘the greatest Lakeland poet since Wordsworth’, read an obituary in The Guardian. But Nicholson was equally a poet of the grubby and dirty industrial Cumbria, and had been discovered by T.S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, whose own work as a poet might be described as being far from pastoral in its concerns or romantic in its leanings. Nicholson’s attachment to his hometown, which some might have seen as a stubborn retreat from a broader experience of the world, seemed to be matched by the methodical labours devoted to his work. ‘I like to think that when I’ve finished a poem you can drop it on the floor and it won’t break’, he once said. Perhaps the same was said of the other products of Millom – the steel that flowed beneath the smoke and flames that lit up the sky around the clock.
After the ironworks that spurred on the growth of the community in those boom years closed in 1968, there was a steadfast refusal to do as many economic and industrial experts advised and simply abandon the town. ‘Exile’, here, as elsewhere in West Cumbria during the 20th century, was frequently advocated as a solution to the troubles that certain places faced.
‘Rather than moving home’, The Guardian reported in 1976, ‘Millomites travel long distances to work’; and what’s more, they did so ‘in part of the country where the communications are bad’. So bad were the routes in and out of Millom, especially the roads, that travelling by motor vehicle was described as a ‘tortuous’ experience. But, by the early 1970s, there was a possible solution that might have been perfect for this unique location on the fast-changing intertidal flats of the Duddon Estuary. A hovercraft-manufacturing company called Sealand – which advocated its craft as the quickest means of travel to circumvent the travel difficulties of Millom’s location – was demonstrating that the tortuous route from Millom to Askam around the Duddon Estuary, which took 30 minutes by road, could be accomplished in less than two minutes for a lucky hovercraft owner.
If that scenario seemed unlikely, it is only because now we can no longer see hovercraft anywhere. People under the age of 50, in fact, may never have seen or heard of these things known as hovercraft. But, not only was this a form of travel that looked to be going places in the 1970s, for a time it did indeed seem to be an idea that would lock-in with attempts to stimulate local population growth for Millom, offering a solution to the obstacles presented by its surrounding landscapes. In the wake of dreams of a coming leisure age, developers saw Millom as providing a perfect location for a new population of middle-class residents, inward migrants with a relaxed lifestyle who would be eager to transplant themselves to the new model settlement at Haverigg – modelled on a Scandinavian fishing village and built on the grounds of the old Millom ironworks.
What was envisaged at the time was a community that could be large enough to support a marina, hotels and a golf course. Local residents in Millom, however, including Nicholson, had their doubts. News reports quoted him as saying that he thought that the only chance the scheme had was if the hovercraft became the adopted means of travel across and around the estuary. But, by the mid-1970s, three years after the first phase of the Haverigg development was opened, the Sealand Company had gone into receivership with mounting and unpaid debts.
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Today, on parts of the land where the old ironworks once existed, the merest of traces remain of that past. In surroundings that can, at first sight, seem as green and pleasant as untouched nature, it is only the oddly contoured shape of a mound here or a raised path there as you venture forth across the land – walking on what is perhaps a former wagon track – that give a clue as to what was once located in this place.
As I traipsed over the land one summer day looking for the site of the old ironworks, it was possible to discern the sound of a loud and dull but distant mechanical pounding. It was the sound of automated clanging coming from back in the town, as if the ghosts of those Millom ironworkers who refused to die continued to invisibly operate some great steel press on the empty land I now found myself standing on.