In 1931 Corby was a Northamptonshire village of about 1,500 people sitting on a fortunate piece of geology - one of England's richest ironstone seams. Lloyd and Lloyd had begun extracting iron ore here on an industrial scale in 1881. In 1903 they merged with the Scottish firm A. and J. Stewarts and Menzies to become Stewarts and Lloyds Ltd. The combined company opened a blast furnace ironworks in Corby in 1910. In 1932 the site was chosen for an enormous expansion. Stewarts and Lloyds needed thousands of skilled steelworkers, and they recruited them from where the skills already existed - from the Clyde shipyards and the Lanarkshire steel mills, which were collapsing through the worst years of the interwar depression. Whole families moved south together. The first steel was made at Corby in October 1935. By 1950 the population had risen to 18,000, and Corby was designated a New Town. The architect William Holford laid out the streets. Glaswegian and Lanarkshire accents settled into the new houses and stayed there.

What makes Corby unusual is not just the presence of Scots but their concentration. In most English towns that received Scottish migration the newcomers were dispersed through existing populations. In Corby the migrants formed the majority. Football clubs played in Scottish leagues by tradition. Pipe bands marched. Burns Night dinners filled the working men's clubs. Children born in Corby grew up speaking a Northamptonshire-inflected version of west-of-Scotland English that linguists have studied as a small dialect island. Big Country's 1984 song Steeltown, the title track of their second album, was explicitly about Corby - about Scottish workers travelling south for jobs that then disappeared. Melody Maker quoted the band that year explaining the song's origins. The connection is so embedded that when local newspapers report on the town's national-team allegiance during major football tournaments, the answer is usually Scotland.

The Corby steelworks closed in stages through the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the major closures in 1980. About 11,000 jobs vanished in a town built around them. Unemployment reached approximately thirty percent at its worst. The same Scots who had come south for the work, and their children and grandchildren, found themselves in a Midlands town with no obvious economic purpose - a small, distant island of Scottish industrial culture stranded by deindustrialisation. The Thatcher government designated Corby an Enterprise Zone in 1981, offering tax relief to companies willing to set up here, and slowly light industry, food processing, and warehousing arrived to absorb the unemployed steelworkers and their adult children. The recovery was uneven and incomplete. Some families left. Many stayed. The town's Scottish character did not dissolve - it sharpened, taking on the defensive identity of communities that have come through hardship together.

Between 1985 and 1997 the Corby Borough Council carried out reclamation work on the contaminated land left behind by the steelworks. The methods used spread toxic dust across the surrounding area. A cluster of children born to mothers who had been in Corby during those years were born with limb deformities. The families sued. In 2009 the High Court found Corby Borough Council liable in negligence and public nuisance - a landmark ruling in English environmental law, establishing that a local authority could be held responsible for birth defects caused by its handling of industrial waste. The case settled in 2010. In February 2025 Netflix released Toxic Town, a four-part drama based on the case, starring Jodie Whittaker, Aimee Lou Wood, and Robert Carlyle. For many viewers it was the first time they had heard of Corby. For Corby itself, the series was a difficult re-airing of the most painful chapter in the town's history. The population today stands at around 68,000 in the wider built-up area - still growing, still Scottish-inflected, still working through what it means to be a steel town with no steelworks. The accents in the supermarkets give the town away every time.