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Although this may look like a fairly ordinary scene, it
shows a fine example of the housing provided in Forgeside for the workers of the
steel mills and collieries on their doorstep. Now plastered and pebble-dashed
(the houses, not the workers) these terraced cottages still provide good homes
despite being a little remote, clinging as they do to the side of the Coity mountain,
and it's a long way to the nearest pub. The imagination and enterprise that went
into providing these dwellings didn't extend to the naming process - not for them
the facile 'Gilchrist Street' or ' Hopkins Terrace'. 'C' Row is around the corner,
but 'A' and 'B' are sadly no more. Luckily at the end of this unnamed street still
exists the building where the vast fortunes of the likes of Carnegie in America
and Krupp in Germany were literally forged. The Old Forge and its pond, the crucible
of modern steel production, will doubtless soon rightly become a multi-media tourist
attraction - Big Pit is yards away, as is the renovated steam railway. |
