How Telford new town healed the scars of the Industrial Revolution and created a community to be proud of
Amid all the noise made over new developments being built on top of Britain's countryside, it's often convenient to forget about the success stories - even when we have one right on our doorstep.
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The New Towns programme was the most ambitious building project ever undertaken in the UK, with the grandiose dream of rebuilding Britain after the Second World War.
It dreamt of moving people from overcrowded, polluted, decaying and sometimes bombed-out inner city areas to sprawling green cities with good schools, shops and recreational facilities within easy reach on foot or by bike.
In what could be the largest land reclamation scheme Britain has ever seen, Telford was built on more than 5,000 acres of brownfield land that was once the East Shropshire coalfield.
While it's easy to look back on old landscape photographs and lament the loss of greenery, often those photographs hide the abandoned slag heaps, pit mounds, quarries, derelict foundries and coal mines that left what historian Maurice De Soisson called "an enormous scar on the face of one of England's fairest counties".
