Milton is a sooty, noisy northern town centred on the cotton mills that employ most of its inhabitants.
However, as she begins to befriend her neighbours, and as her stormy relationship with the mill-owner John Thornton develops, she starts to see Milton in a different light..
Arriving from a rural idyll in the south, Margaret Hale is initially shocked by the social unrest and poverty she finds there.
Milton is a sooty, noisy northern town centred on the cotton mills that employ most of its inhabitants