It closed in the late 1970s, as the British steel industry fell into near terminal decline. So, although this is not a particularly beautiful or valuable find, it tells us a lot about the social history of the Garden City and the fortunes of Britain's manufacturing industries. It is also useful in that it tells us that any layer in which it is found must be later than 1915.
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During that time, I maintained a blog (http://www.nortoncommarch.co.uk/ that recorded my thoughts on how the excavation was progressing. It's a salutary exercise to look back through it and see how my interpretation of what we were finding changed as more evidence was uncovered. The soils immediately underneath the turf contained a lot of recent material, including pieces of plastic (which became common only during the 1950s), mixed with a lot of industrial waste. This was a generally greenish vitrified substance, which we were able to trace back to the Kryn and Lahy (K&L) steelworks that was once one of the Garden City's biggest employers. Established in 1915 by two Belgian refugees, it quickly became an important local business and by the 1930s, was one of the most advanced steelworks in the country. We also found a lot of iron nails in the lower of these layers, sometimes in dense concentrations. They were probably once part of the barn. Some were very substantial and were perhaps originally part of the framework itself. Other iron finds in these layers included a horseshoe and a length of chain. The site of the barn was visible as two parallel rows of bricks.
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