When Tony Gosling was a boy in Scunthorpe, each night his bedroom would be aglow with orange, red and yellow. These lights, which danced and flickered around his room, came from the town’s monolithic steelworks. They set him on a course that four generations of his family had followed before him. At 16 he joined British Steel as an apprentice and, bar a short stint in the army, has worked there ever since. When Gosling was growing up in the 1970s, everybody living on his road in north Scunthorpe was a steelworker, except the local vicar. In fact, if someone had told him their dad didn’t “work at the steelers”, Gosling would have thought them quite odd.
The steelworks in Scunthorpe predate the town; the smelting of steel in the mid 19th century gave rise to a settlement in this corner of North Lincolnshire, which in time became Scunthorpe. The local football club is nicknamed “the Iron”, and Scunthorpe’s motto – “The heavens reflect our labours” – refers to the glow of the steelworks that lit up Gosling’s bedroom.
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