Salisbury

This article is about a Oceanic City. For the Willinkian Capital of the same name, see Salisbury (Willink).

Salisbury

Population	78,353
District	Salisbury
County	Salisbury
Province	West Oceania
Country	United Kingdom
Post Town	Salisbury
Postal Code	SY14, SY15, SY16
Parliament District	Salisbury

Salisbury is the eponymous county town of the smallest suburban community directly adjacent to the city of Breningrad. As of the 2005 census, the town has a population of 78,353 people who are connected directly to the Breningrad Mass Transit System.

History

Founded in the nineteenth century on the western slopes of the Donne Mountains, the community was named for the birthplace of the town’s founder Edward Donne, Salisbury England. Although the date for Donne’s community is 1852, recent archaeological evidence indicates that at some point in the region’s history the site of Salisbury may have been the focal point for a group of nomadic cave dwellers who hunted down in the valley below the town.

Donne’s Salisbury, however, came to be know for the quarries and iron mining that dominated the industrial powerhouse of the early Commonwealth, much of which was focused on the city of Breningrad, whose outer limits reach just 24 kilometers from Salisbury. Through a vertical railroad built at an angle of forty degrees, miners in Salisbury were able to send their cargo down the mountainside to the processing centres in what was quickly becoming the nascent country’s largest city in terms of both population and industrial production.

This population growth of Breningrad brought in money from financiers, financiers who wanted homes away from the pollution-ridden capital. Many brought their money to the county of Salisbury where they purchased homes of their own, or in the case of Edwardton, purchased plots of land for an entire community to be built in order to service their needs.

By the end of the Second World War, however, the mines began to run dry and more profitable veins were discovered in the mountains further to the west leaving Salisbury dry for source of employment – except to the local wealthy landowners. In 1952, the township closed the Grimbaldt Mine and converted the operations facility, with its vertical railroad, into a tourist attraction designed for students, of whom there were many in the cities below the mountains. At the same time.

By the mid-1980s, however, the township was in dire financial straits as the public services rendered by the town were drying up quickly as the sources of income, the landowners, began to die off or simply sold their land for newer and more picturesque properties elsewhere in the Commonwealth. A young township councilman, however, had decided to try and fix the problem.

Alistair Tetley convinced the council to sell off the publicly owned assets of the town, including its small hydro-electric damn that tapped the waterfall to the south of the town proper. Additionally, he restructured the township’s pension system for the public employees by introducing a gradual shift away from pensions to managed investment portfolios, the management by either a township commission or the employee him or herself. Most importantly, however, he cut what he considered non-essential programmes regarding welfare, instead attempting to implement a workfare programme.

By the 1990s the town’s financial fortunes had improved, and the resurgent city of Breningrad, which had survived the difficult transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy, once more had wealthy urbanites looking for mountain retreats. The town now features three ski-resorts on the high mountain peaks in addition to the still operating Grimbaldt History Centre. Plans are in the works for the construction of a light rail system that would carry passengers directly from the town into the city as the current linkage to the Breningrad Mass Transit System is through busses.

Trade and Industry

While the township thrived as a mining centre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the small reserves ran out by the late 1940s and the once highly lucrative industry went elsewhere, leaving most citizens of Salisbury out of work with no income.

Yet with the continuing importance of the town as a resort for the wealthy, the focus of commerce shifted from the mines to the niche market for short-term goods and services as well as long-term service companies. While companies such as Grimbaldt Mines, the former large employer, went under, new family run businesses that took care of property management, property security, and even gourmet grocery stores blossomed.

Yet, by the 1980s even this source of income for the town and its inhabitants ran dry as the landowners moved away and despite the best efforts of men like Tetley and other councilpersons to resurrect the dying town, nothing significant happened until the money began to trickle in back in the early to mid 1990s.

The city’s economic depression in the late 80s highlighted the town’s dependence on external sources of revenue and as such the town has begun to invest its surplus money in the market and hard assets such as infrastructure and real-estate to provide the town with financial security should another depression occur.

Geography

The town sits below the peak of Mount MacKay, an extinct volcano. Because of the former volcanic activity of the mountain there exist numerous caverns and tunnels where magma used to flow and pool, the cooling under pressure now creating exquisite cave systems that display ornate crystal patterns.

From Mount Heatherton there flows a small river, the power of which is collected and sold by the Westinghouse Energy Company through their hydroelectric dam. While this formerly existed as a marvelous waterfall, like much else in the township, the waterfall has disappeared.

Famous People

• Alistair Tetley, 1st Marquess of Salisbury, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
• Jeffrey Touquay, Author