Young Corby, Once Called Corbie.

A Memory of Corby.

This photo must have been taken early in the morning because that play area was always packed with wee yins in the 1960s. I know because I was one of them. There were lots of what I used to call swing parks in Corby in the 1960s. Corby was a very young place in 1965, not just the new town but its people as well. The expanding steelworks attracted thousands of young migrants, mainly from Scotland. I remember I was on a bus with my mum travelling to Kettering, the nearest town to Corby. I was about four. I remember this very strange woman getting on the bus who had lines and wrinkles all over her face. I stared and stared till my mum told me off for being rude. The woman smiled at us. She said, in what I was to come to recognise as the local Northamptonshire accent, that I was to be forgiven. She remarked that I probably had never seen an old person before. She was right. Everybody in Corby was young, including the adults. It seems strange now. Now of course all those young people have grown old and Corby in demographics is not much different than anywhere else.