Good Companions Around Scunthorpe

This ebook is a work of fiction. The aim of the ‘Good Companions around’ series is to share personal impressions and inspirations from towns and cities that are often overlooked. I have walked, read, looked, listened, felt, lived or worked within these places. They are places of the imagination and are not defined by the boundaries of local government. They are places experienced through childhood, work, leisure, family, friendship, aspiration and memory. In part, this, and other books in the series are offered as a small antidote to the general degradation of the lives of so called ordinary people.

Around Scunthorpe we begin with a novel penned by a country vicar from Crowle: Manuscript in a Red Box. It is a story of arson, tyrants, intolerance, and love across the divide in the Isle of Axholme - a flat and featureless landscape to the unimaginative eye. We then move onto Ted Lewis’ ‘Get Carter’; set around Scunthorpe, and north to the south bank of the Humber.  Who would have thought, a defining film noir of British cinema would be inspired by a small town, a creation of the twentieth century steel industry, in the middle of rural Lincolnshire? Cinema makers could not imagine it either, and moved the story to Newcastle. Such dramatic events are not meant to exist in ordinary places, a perception these books seek to address.