﻿ Middlesborough review: Rapid development and workers’ struggle
- Communist Party of Great Britain Thursday November 29 2012
Middlesborough review: Rapid development and workers’ struggle
David Douglass reviews: Minoru Yasumoto, 'The rise of a
Victorian ironopolis: Middlesbrough and regional
industrialisation', Boydell Press, 2011, pp250, £60
Middlesbrough: workers’ recognition  Not for the casual reader,
this comprehensive work charts the remarkable rise of
Middlesbrough, Britain’s foremost iron town. Middlesbrough was a
town which grew like Topsy seemingly overnight. It was said it
was not discovered: it was manufactured - “Cincinnati and
Chicago are perhaps the best specimens of American-made towns
with which Middlesbrough can be compared: but these do not equal
in self-sustaining vigour or rapidly of growth of the Pease-
founded colony on the banks of the Tees” (L Praed History of the
rise and progress of Middlesbrough Newcastle 1863, p3).  When
the owners of the estate started planning the town in 183