The most well-known product of Millom, besides steel, was the poet Norman Nicholson, ‘the greatest Lakeland poet since Wordsworth’, read an obituary in The Guardian. But Nicholson was equally a poet of the grubby and dirty industrial Cumbria, and had been discovered by T.S. Eliot at Faber and Faber, whose own work as a poet might be described as being far from pastoral in its concerns or romantic in its leanings.