Region Profiles (user search)

Part II

Geography

Peterford is conventionally divided into five distinct regions; the rugged Adland peninsular, the windswept (some would claim 'bleak') lowlands on the coast of Fellsands Bay, the fertile Blackwath Valley on the border with Lindsay, the Fretchit Plain on the west coast and the Forest of Nead which covers Peterford's share of the Millack massif. Most of the population live in the two regions that were heavily industrialised at the end of the nineteenth century; the coast of Fellsands Bay (a traditional centre of heavy industry - notably copper smelting, steel, shipbuilding and coal mining - as well as an important centre of the deep sea fishing industry. The area now has one of the most serious pollution problems on Antillia) and the Forest of Nead, an area that developed as a result of its coal and iron industries. A secondary centre of population can be found on the coasts of the Adland, where proximity to Pitfarris has led to an important transport and shipping industry, where a small coalfield led to significant nineteenth century industrial development and which was sufficiently remote to become the home of Antillia's largest nuclear power station (at Calderhall).

History

Early Centuries

During the early history of Antillia, Peterford was almost desolate; too far from Scotland to develop in the way that Pitfarris did, and of little interest to the Norse communities on the east coast. Early attempts at English colonisation failed on account of its remoteness and poor land, and a stable population was only established after the second Plantation in 1693. Almost all of these settlers came from just five counties (Durham, Gloucestershire, Nottinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Shropshire) giving Peterford a very different culture to that of the burgeoning and relatively cosmopolitan colony of Lindsay to its south. The economy of Peterford was dominated during this period by fishing and subsistence farming and emigration (at first to other parts of Antillia, but then to Britain and America) became a serious problem during the late eighteenth century. Physical isolation, economic insecurity and a pronounced cultural difference with the rest of the Colony created a potent mixture of long-term discontent with both Britain and to the colonial and economic elites on Antillia, a situation greatly increased by two radical changes in the structure of society in Peterford; its mass conversion away from Anglicanism in the late eighteenth century and its rapid industrialisation towards the end of the nineteenth.

Religious Change and the New Radicalism

The Established Church never made any serious attempt to organise itself in Peterford, which left the region open to the appeal of Nonconformity; after a visit from John Wesley in 1763 the bulk of the population converted to Methodism. When the Methodist Church split between Wesleyans and Primitives, the bulk of Peterfords Methodists joined the Primitives. Religious change led, eventually, to political radicalisation as the struggle for religious equality soon morphed into the struggle for political change. Peterford became a notorious centre for radicalism and sedition, and a violent uprising in the Forest of Nead in 1848 was brutally repressed by the colonial authorities.

Industrial Peterford

The second great change occurred in 1875 when coal was discovered just west of the small village of Donsett on the northern edge of the Forest. Rapid industrial expansion followed as the size and commercial potential of the Donsett Coalfield became apparent. This process was further intensified when the St Marks industrialist George Andersson gambled on combining the coal and copper resources of Antillia and established a massive copper smelting works in the old fishing town of Fellsands. The gamble paid off Fellsands ('the Swansea of the North') soon became one of the great industrial boom towns of the late nineteenth century, and a centre for a wide range of heavy industry, from steel and copper to shipbuilding and (eventually) chemicals. The industrialisation of Peterford caused a massive influx of migrant workers (mostly from Wales, Northern England and Norway) and the development of both a fiercely proletarian political culture and Antillia's first serious Labour movement. The Federation of Antillian Workers (uniting Unions from across the colony) was established in 1891 and Antillia's first socialist party, the Antillian Socialist Democratic Party (ASDP) was formed a year later at a meeting in Fellsands. In 1910 it merged with the pro-independence Antillian People's Party (APP) to form the Socialist People's Party (SPP), the most influential political party in Antillia's history and the one that eventually led it to independence.

Depression, Independence and the Present Day

Peterford was hit hard by the Depression and in many ways its economy has never really recovered. Mines, factories and shipyards all fell silent and, in a blow as catastrophic as it was significant, the Andersson Smelting Complex closed forever in 1937. The perceived neglect of Antillia by the National Government in Britain led to a hardening of attitudes in all parts of Antillia, but nowhere was this more apparent than Peterford where an increasingly hard-line SPP began to dominate electorally from the 1933 municipal elections onwards. Despite the bitterness of the interwar years, the SPP and other nationalist organisations loyally supported the British government during the Second World War and were rewarded for their pains when the Colony of Antillia was granted independence in 1947 (the Attlee government having decided that Antillia was to expensive to hold onto and that, anyway, the SPP would form a friendly government). The decades after independence were good to Peterford with the Hammveld government investing a massive amount of money and attention in the region, and as the new welfare state and the post-war economic boom resulted in a dramatic rise in living standards, a process intensified by massive slum clearance programmes in Fellsands during the late 1960s. Yet in recent decades Peterford has been beset by a long list of problems and crises as the basis for the post-independence settlement has been undermined by global political change and global economic forces. Its industrial base collapsed during the early 1980s (there are now just three active collieries in the region, one steelworks, only the remains of a shipbuilding industry and nothing left of the once mighty copper-smelting industry) and most of its state support was withdrawn by the De Soute government during the same period. Unemployment is now stubbornly high (as are emigration rates) and attempts to attract new industries have been unsuccessful. The very foundations of its political culture were rocked in the 1970s (and again in the 1990s) by a series of sordid corruption scandals involving local SPP administrations, something that has also undermined the influence of the region over national politics. As the Pitfarris Question returned to dominate the affairs of state in the late 1980s, even the SPP-led administrations of MacDougal and Houtsman did relatively little to aid Peterfords flailing economy, while the free-market agenda of the right-wing Wanbeck administration resulted in riots in the streets of Fellsands, Donsett and Blackhaven. Peterfords journey from the periphery to the core and back to the periphery is tragic and has left a legacy of considerable bitterness amongst both its inhabitants and its political establishment.

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