The Victoria History of Shropshire
Asa Briggs reviews Volume XI, on the new town of Telford and its unique heritage.
- The Victoria History of Shropshire: Volume XI, Telford
Edited by G.C. Baugh - Published for the University of London, Institute of Historical Research, by Oxford University Press – XIX + 377pp - £50
The new town of Telford, so named in 1968, includes within its boundaries Ironbridge, 'the cradle of the industrial revolution'. There is no other new town with such a unique historic heritage. As a result – and as a result also of the imaginative activities of the Ironbridge Gorge Trust – thousands of visitors, some of them children, some of them knowledgeable about industrial history and archaeology, are attracted each year to Telford. They are the natural successors to the enchanted visitors to Coalbrookdale in the eighteenth century who found far more to see there than Telford's new iron bridge, the first in the world, built in 1779.
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