The four -part miniseries “Toxic Town” arrives on Netflix on Thursday 27 February 2025. Written by Jack Thorne and directed by Minkie Spiro, has a cast that includes Jodie Whittaker, Robert Carlyle, Aimee Lou Wood, Rory Kinnear and Brendan Coyle. The story narrated is taken from an environmental scandal that occurred in Great Britain starting from the late 80s. The slag of steel production caused the birth of children with malformations. The road that led to the condemnation of the culprits was longer than expected.
Toxic Town: the true story of Corby’s toxic waste
Corby is a town in the Northamptonshire who for decades has linked its name to the steel industry. As well imaginable, when the steel mill closed in 1980, leaving 11,000 men without work, the blow was devastating; But the economic damage was not the only problem: the territory found itself trapped in a toxic cloud. The waste of the steel production – a lethal mixture of arsenic – cadmium and calcium, lay in enormous pitching basins in the surroundings of the city, transforming the old quarries into stagnant poles of poisons. To avoid environmental disaster and give a new life to Corby, the city council obtained government funds for a massive remediation work. The promise was ambitious: cleaning the area and using it as a trampoline for the rebirth of the city.
Between the end of the 80s and the mid -90s, trucks loaded with toxic sludge crossed Corby’s streets to transport waste to landfills on the margins of the city. The huge problem was that nobody worried about covering them; With the result that, for years, the mud scattered on the roads, it worn and transformed into poisonous powder, capable of nesting in people’s lungs and impregnating the air that pregnant mothers breathed every day.
The children born in those years began to present deformities to the limbs in an anomalous number: between 1989 and 1998, 19 newborn baby born with the arts malformations and some cases were even more serious, such as that of Shelby, the daughter of Tracy Taylor, born with very serious problems for the organs and died shortly after childbirth. Tracy of Tracy was not an isolated case: even Susan McIntyre, whose son Connor was born without a hand, noticed many other mothers in the hospital with children with similar malformations. Yet on the story seemed to reign a general silence, until Graham Hind, a Sunday Times journalist, knocked on his door in 1999.
Corby’s case exploded just when Hind published an investigation; And a lawyer named Des Collins moved on to defend families, kicked off a legal battle that lasted almost ten years. Unfortunately, the tests were difficult to find and the city council denied all responsibility, even if someone had decided to speak from the inside and on the Collins’ desk an anonymous file of confidential documents appeared. Cards that revealed exactly what the advice had tried to cover up for years. An internal report warns that the residents would have been exposed to toxic substances such as arsenic, zinc and boron during reclamation. Another relationship, drawn up by the auditor, spoke of an unscrupulous attitude in the management of the operation. Yet no one had stopped those trucks discovered and nobody had protected the population.
In 2009, after a long judicial battle, Corby’s mothers won the case: the court recognized the negligence of the city council and declared him responsible for environmental damage and public security violations. Families were assigned 14.6 million pounds as compensation, but nobody ever paid with his career or freedom for that disaster (the former leader of the Council Kelvin Glendenning continued to deny everything to the last).
The trailer of the film
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie6wsx0py58
