Renewing the Rust-Belt

If you go north out of Boston, Massachusetts, the names of towns are familiar to English ears – Malden and Waltham, Winchester and Woburn, Wakefield, Reading and Billericay – but their geographical relationships confusing. There is not only a Suffolk-Essex border, but a Norfolk-Middlesex one! Then, just north of Chelmsford comes the city of Lowell, named not after a place in England but a Bostonian merchant with a photographic memory. It happened like this.