Featured Image Credit: Netflix
Topics: Netflix, TV and Film
Jess Battison
Netflix released a whole load of bangers last month and right towards the end, a new series dropped that hit pretty close to home.
Toxic Town landed on Thursday (27 February) and tells a shocking true story as viewers have been left in tears by the harrowing show.
Telling what Netflix describes as ‘one of the UK’s biggest environmental scandals’, the drama has a stacked cast including Jodie Whittaker, Aimee Lou Wood, Claudia Jessie, Robert Carlyle and Brendan Coyle.
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Toxic Town portrays the real-life battle of families in the British town of Corby whose children were born with defects.
Written by Jack Thorne, it focuses on a group of mums who ‘took on a David and Goliath battle for justice’.
Back in 1979, there were around 10,000 people working at Corby’s steelworks, but it ended up closing down in 1980.
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With thousands unemployed, a regeneration project was launched, with The British Steel Corporation demolishing the works as the council started to regain the land.
For this project, millions of tonnes of contaminated waste was moved to the outskirts of town, to Deene Quarry. Puddles of ‘sludge’ were reportedly left throughout the town as one resident told The Independent: “You could taste it in the air; it was sour, gassy and acidic.”
But years later, worry started to grow as women in the local area starting giving birth to children with defects including clubbed feet, missing fingers, eye problems and heart defects. This then started a decade-long legal battle.
After a group of mums spoke out about their concerns, noting the only thing that connected them was their time spent in Corby, more families came forward.
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Despite the concerns, a 1999 Northamptonshire Health Authority study didn’t find any unusual cluster of birth defects in the area.
Yet solicitor Des Collins found that birth defects in Corby were actually three times higher than in the surrounding area, as reported by the BBC.
He then went about assembling a team of experts and cadmium was eventually identified on the former steel site. Research linked this heavy metal to birth defects in animals.
“The more you look into it, the more complicated it all becomes,” Thorne said of the story to Tudum. “I’ve done legal dramas before, but this one … being taken through the actual truth of it and seeing the journey that they had to go on in order to prove this, I found very surprising and shocking.”
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And so, in what was a landmarking ruling in environmental justice, Justice Akenhead ruled in favour of the claimants.
Toxic Town focuses on the mothers who challenged the council as it tells a story ‘of community resilience in the face of institutional negligence and greed’.
“It’s a genuinely working-class story,” Thorne added. “It’s a story of people who are not part of the system that have never thought the system would work for them, working within the system and [fighting for] the result they deserved.”
Viewers who have already binged the show wrote on X that it’s a ‘heartbreaking’ watch as they said they’re ‘in tears’ from it.
Others said they ‘can’t get their head around this true story’ as one put: “Toxic Town is so far the best thing I have watched on Netflix!”
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You can stream Toxic Town on Netflix now.