Splintered Isle: A Forgotten Steelworks

An experiment based on an article from the New York Times.

In a wasteland on the edge of the Scottish town of Motherwell, our final stop, Tommy Brennan pointed out things that were no longer there.

There had stood the factory gates, he said, there the cooling towers. This was once one of Europe’s biggest steelworks, where Mr. Brennan first worked in 1943.

But now there was nothing but yellowing grass. Once bigger than Central Park, the Ravenscraig steelworks was shut and dismantled in 1992, after being privatized by London’s Conservative government. That put an estimated 10,000 residents out of work, including Mr. Brennan.

A gathering of campaigners for Scottish independence in Clydebank.

Tommy Brennan, a former steelworker in Motherwell, showing a photograph of the plant.

In Shirebrook, I saw how deindustrialization eventually contributed to Brexit. But in Motherwell it helped heighten resentment of the British state rather than of Europe: In 2016, this area voted to stay in the European Union, but in a Scottish independence referendum in 2014 it favored leaving the United Kingdom.

Mr. Brennan was among those voters — he had concluded that London would never prioritize Scottish interests. “If we’d been an independent nation when Ravenscraig closed,” he said, “it would never have closed.”

Yet alienation takes many forms, even in the same town. After talking with Mr. Brennan, I crossed Motherwell to meet a woman born the year after the steelworks closed.

With little permanent work in a post-steel Motherwell, Ashleigh Melia had spent her adult life in temporary jobs on the minimum wage. Now, in her work as a cleaner, employers sometimes send her away as soon as she arrives — there’s no work that day, and therefore no pay.