Turning back the clock to look at Shropshire in the 2000s
Toby Neal continues his look through the decades ot mark the Shropshire Star's 60th anniversary. Today, the 2000s.
Watch more of our videos on ShotsTV.com
and on Freeview 262 or Freely 565
The new millennium dawned with a breaking out of the bubbly, but as the 2000s unfolded the fizz went flat and the decade closed with the bitter taste of austerity.
The promise and hope for the future offered by a huge party like no other as 1999 turned to 2000 was not borne out by what followed, which all too often was disaster, catastrophe, and war.In 2008 there was an international banking crisis where ordinary people who were left to pay the price as economies crashed.
Apart from that financial disaster there were other disasters, with a devastating terrorist attack on America, which changed the world, and a tsunami which claimed over 200,000 lives.
Closer to home the worst floods for many years caused extensive damage and misery in Shropshire, and an outbreak of foot and mouth disease hit agriculture.
And yet it had all started on such a great note and in Shropshire it was marked in a lasting way by the revival of the Wrekin Beacon, the much-loved “friendly light” which for generations had been such a heartening sight for Salopians returning home, but had been turned off, seemingly forever, in the mid-1960s.
On October 30, 2000, the famous Royal Oak tree at Boscobel, a direct descendant of the tree in the branches of which King Charles II had hidden from the Roundheads in the 17th century, was severely damaged in a gale. It was a curtain raiser for what was to come.
Almost immediately heavy rain brought floods which hit Shropshire’s river towns of Shrewsbury, Ironbridge, and Bridgnorth, and covered huge swathes of agricultural land.
It was Shropshire’s wettest autumn since local records began, with 14 inches of rain in three months. For those householders and business owners who were clearing up the mess, there was to be a heartbreaking and cruel twist, as in December there were new storms and renewed severe flooding in Shropshire and Mid Wales, with things almost as bad as they had been at the beginning of November. They went through the misery all over again.
It was to lead to a sea change of opinion in Shrewsbury, which had turned down flood defences in the 1990s. Now the town couldn’t get them fast enough.
