Shirebrook is the kind the of place where everyone greets you in the street and the brass band plays in the park on a Saturday, teenagers preen in the town square for want of other places to flirt, and the library is bustling with people taking advantage of free internet – perhaps because they don’t have access at home.
In the mid-1980s this was sometimes called “the Belfast of England”. Miners split over whether or not to strike and the community divided around them. More recently, the tensions have been about another iconic issue. When Sports Direct set up its headquarters on the edge of town, they employed thousands of Eastern European agency workers, in notoriously shocking conditions. But the first thing to say about civil society in this East Midlands town is that society is, on the whole, very civil. People, are very friendly: more like a rural village than the weathered industrial architecture would imply.
