Shropshire Star

Talking Telford: Face-to-face with a statue then left in the dust by a runner

When was the last time you gazed on the face of the man who gave Telford its name?

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One day last week I walked past the statue of the famous civil engineer and poet Thomas Telford which stands outside the town’s magistrates court, as I’ve done a thousand times before, but thought for the first time about how rare it must be for someone to have a statue built of them in a town that was literally named after them.

There is Queen Victoria with her likenesses in Victoria Squares and Victoria Parks the world over, but surely ol’ Thomas is the only one with a statue in an entire town built in his image. And Telford doesn’t have Victoria’s ugly colonialist legacy to contend with - score one for the engineer.