The town of Corby is easily among the most interesting and unique in not only Northamptonshire but in the entire United Kingdom as a whole. Nobody quite knows what to expect from Corby at any given time in history and it is this refreshing unpredictability that keeps in in the forefront of our public consciousness at nearly all times. For one, Corby has the fastest growing population in the United Kingdom and, with its population already over fifty thousand, it will certainly be interesting to see how the town and its citizens cope with its downright rapid growth. What is truly odd about Corby, though, is that such an exponential growth is usually more common with newer towns that were engineered in recent years. Corby, on the other hand, is actually one of the oldest towns in England and has been inhabited in some manner or another for countless years.
Archeologists and anthropologists have uncovered artifacts in Corby that prove that the area was the home to people from as far back as the Mesolithic and Neolithic Era. Relics have also been found in the area that show that Corby (though it wasn't called that at the time) had already been civilized since the Bronze Age. This means that Corby was a community in every sense of the word around the same time that Abraham and his contemporaries in the Old Testament were taking in the sights of Canaan. Corby finally earned its name around the 700s when Danish settlers created a full fledged city by the name of "Corbei". Even before that time, though, Corby was important to nearly every civilization that was in control of the area because of the fantastic amount of iron that has traditionally been uncovered in its surroundings. During the days of the Roman Empire Corby was an indispensable mining town and this has been its role in the world for the majority of its life.
Iron mining finally caught up with the industrial revolution by the early 1900s and by then Corby was forever changed on the surface as advanced machines were constructed to get the remaining bits of iron in the town that weren't stripped from the countless centuries of mining that came before. By that time, though, steel became the name of the game and it was no surprise to anybody that Corby became an industry town in just a few short years. It is around this time that the population finally began to grow at a rapid rate but even by 1950 there were still only around eighteen thousand residents or so. With the decline of the steel industry in the 1960s many people thought that Corby would be ruined but, curiously, this is when the town really started to grow. This is yet another confusing and unique event that makes Corby all the more infuriating when one tries to pin it down or pigeonhole it. At any rate, perhaps it is best just to let things be and realize that Corby is a town that plays to the beat of its own drummer.
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