Pictures from the past
A round-up of Shropshire Star nostalgia pictures for the week ending December 5, 2009.
The Triumph Herald: now there was a car!
The classic British motor is seen here in a photo of Coalport High Street which Paul France, who loaned it to us, thinks was taken in the late 1960s.
Hidden behind the trees on the left is Nuway Manufacturing Company Ltd.
Paul said: "The yard was used to store thousands of used truck tyres which the company reprocessed to manufacture a huge range of rubber link matting.
The premises were previously the home of the Coalport China Company who moved to Stoke-on-Trent in 1927. Nuway moved in and occupied the site until the early 1990s when they moved to the Halesfield industrial estate."
It was loaned to us by Mrs Jan Cockerill, of Wellington, whose great-grandparents came from the Clun and Knighton areas.
She tells us that this view dates from the early 1900s and that the school is now a community centre.nextpage
The Lawley area of Telford is currently earmarked for a huge housing development although, because of the recession, it's been a bit of a stop-start business.
But in this photo we're having a look at a previous life for the area as an extensive opencast mine. This view dates from May 20, 1988.
The land at Newdale and Lawley was subsequently levelled and reinstated so that, if you didn't know it had once been a mine, you'd never have guessed.nextpage
We brought you a picture of opencast mining at Newdale in this spot yesterday so, just for a change, today we're bringing you... opencast mining at The Rock.
This photo was taken on July 27, 1976.
It may come as a surprise to some younger folk that significant parts of the Telford landscape looked like this within living memory.
Opencast mining is, though, not something of the past just ask residents at Little Wenlock or New Works, who are not exactly enthusiastic about the prospect of scenes like this on their doorstep in the near future, under a big opencast mining scheme in the shadow of The Wrekin.nextpage
Does this look familiar?
Probably not unless, that is, you worked at Haybridge Steel Works in Hadley, for this is the interior as seen on February 10, 1971.
The works is a disappeared part of Telford's industry.
In the last part of its life it was called Flather Bright Steels.
It closed in the early 1980s and today is the site of a car dealership.
