The Powerful True Story Behind Netflix's 'Toxic Town'
Susan Macintyre, from Corby in Northamptonshire, was heavily pregnant when she heard her friend, Mandy Thorpe, had given birth to a boy with a deformed hand. Naturally, she paid her a visit as a gesture of support. No mother wants their baby to suffer a lifelong disability. It’s exceptionally rare but sometimes it happens – just terribly bad luck. Or so they thought.
A few months later, Susan’s son Connor was born with the exact same birth defect. Then, that December, so was Daniel, the son of another local mum, Joy Shatford. It happened again the following March to Anita Nathwani’s baby, Kerri, then to Maggie Mahon’s son, Sam, born with a club foot.
Such a tight cluster of babies with limb differences in such a short space of time in such a small town… it couldn’t be a coincidence, could it?
No. Its chances were ten times higher than a town of Corby’s size should expect.
It took some months for people to realise that most of these mothers lived near a recently decommissioned steelwork, while others had regularly visited the area during pregnancy. It took a little longer to realise that toxic particles from the site hadn’t been disposed of properly and were now finding their way into people’s bodies.
What followed was one of the greatest David vs Goliath lawsuits in recent British history as the mothers of 30 children waged a decade-long war on Corby Borough Council for negligence and dereliction of duty.
It’s film-worthy stuff. It was just a matter of time, then, until Netflix created a series about the scandal. It’s called Toxic Town and stars Jodie Whittaker, Aimee Lou Wood, Rory Kinnear and Robert Carlyle. Here is the true story on which it’s based.
What does Corby have to do with steel?
Corby is not the sort of town you move to without a reason. Nowadays, it has two: skateboarding and steel. It is home to Europe’s largest indoor skatepark –120,000 feet of ramps, bowls, ‘volcanoes’ and anything else you can jump off on wheels.
Then there’s steel. It was once known as "Little Scotland" due to the army of Scottish workers who came for its steelworks. It is said Corby has the largest concentration of Scots south of Hadrian’s Wall.
Steel came to Corby in the 1930s, when Glasgow-based Stewarts & Lloyds built a steel and ironworks. In 1967 the industry was nationalised and the British Steel Corporation took over.
By the 1970s, pin-striped men in London decided to restructure the nation’s steel industry, and Corby didn’t make the cut. It had grown into one of the largest steelmaking operations in Western Europe. But there were more modern plants elsewhere on the island that did a better, more efficient job.
So, between 1984 and 1999, it fell to Corby Borough Council to demolish, excavate and regenerate the 680-acre site. A part of that job was to transport industrial waste through populated areas to a quarry. Here’s where the trouble began.
Toxic dust and fizzing ponds
Steel production inherently generates a cocktail of waste, like slag (a mixture of impurities) and various dusts and sludges. Some of it is toxic, especially heavy metals like arsenic, lead, chromium, and cadmium.
The plan was to dump the site’s waste, steel, dust and slag in Deene Quarry. To get there, lorries had to drive through populated areas. These lorries should have been covered to prevent the dust from being carried off in the breeze. Their wheels should have been washed before setting off for the dump site. Neither happened – at least, not as thoroughly as they should’ve been.
So, with up to 200 vehicle movements a day, Corby’s air quickly filled with dust particles. It filled kitchens and fell on food. “It was like a sandstorm sometimes,” claimant Louise Taylor told The Guardian in 2009, 17 years after her son was born with a hand deformity. Residents later described sludgy pools that smelled “like a hospital ward” and fizzed when children threw stones in them.
Anita Nathwani described getting caught behind a lorry on her way to the supermarket and seeing murky liquid spilling out onto the road. ‘[It was] like watery stuff falling on the roads - going up towards Asda," she told The Guardian.
A court was later told of an “atmospheric soup of toxic materials” that hung over the town of 60,000 people. And they were all breathing it in.
Arsenic, zinc, boron, nickel
Meanwhile, in London, Sunday Times journalist Graham Hind received a tip about problems with the clear-up of a decommissioned Midlands steelworks and birth defects in babies born nearby.
He and colleague Stephen Bevan got hold of an auditor’s report that revealed one of the quarry sites contained dangerous levels of arsenic, zinc, boron, and nickel. They asked a paediatrician about the possible links between such chemicals and birth defects. They called Susan McIntyre (Jodie Whittaker) who told them of her suspicions that mothers in the town may have been poisoned. They broke the story in 1999.
Of the many people who read the story was a solicitor and Corby local Des Collins. He caught a scent and set out to track down mothers in his hometown with children showing symptoms the article had described.
In the end, 19 families signed onto Collins’ class action suit. They were going to court.
'Naive, ignorant, arrogant, incompetent'
Corby Council denied it all, insisting there was no evidence to link the clear-up work with the children's birth defects. After all, proving the influence of toxic chemicals on unborn baby health is notoriously difficult, not least due to the enormous variety of factors and circumstances in a mother’s life that could impact foetal development.
In response, the families’ legal representatives presented a swathe of expert analysis, including a report from an environmental expert that concluded the negligent handling of the waste by Corby Borough Council demonstrated “naivety, arrogance, ignorance, incompetence and a possible serious conflict of interest”.
The cavalier council
By 2009, after ten years of litigation, the case reached the High Court. It did not go well for Corby Borough Council.
Crucial evidence included an internal council report highlighting high toxin levels, an auditor's report citing incompetence, and expert testimony establishing a 2.5 times increased risk of limb defects in Corby babies compared to the surrounding region.
The council was also accused of illegally transporting the toxic waste without the proper license and deliberately avoiding thorough site analysis due to cost, demonstrating a "cavalier approach" and a prioritisation of land redevelopment over public safety.
There had been allegations of corruption in the awarding of the contracts as far back as 1997. The police even investigated, but the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was insufficient evidence to prosecute.
In his ruling, Mr Justice Akenhead found the council had been “extensively negligent in its control and management of the sites”, and “did not really appreciate the enormity, ramifications and difficulty” of its task in clearing up the material.
He concluded that contaminated mud and dust deposited over public areas could 'realistically have caused' the birth defects, finding Corby council guilty of a public nuisance and in breach of their duty of care under the Environmental Protection Act.
Still, the council continued to deny a causal link between the cleanup work and the birth defects and refused to apologise until one was proven.
Then, in 2010, its chief executive performed an remarkable u-turn, apologising to the families and offering an secret settlement, thought to be in the millions. They agreed.
'It wasn't about the money'
The Corby case is considered one of the most significant incidents of childhood poisoning since the thalidomide tragedy, where a drug given to pregnant women caused widespread birth defects.
As a result, the Corby case established legal precedent for holding local authorities accountable for toxic waste handling, drove environmental regulation changes, and heightened public awareness of industrial contamination risks.
As for the families, they say it was never about the money. As McIntyre explains in the press notes, “Money didn't interest any of us. All we wanted to know was, ‘Why? Why did this happen to us? How do we stop it happening to anyone else?’”
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