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Big 40 for the Shropshire Star

The Shropshire Star is celebrating its 40th anniversary.

To help mark the occasion the world-renowned Red Arrows aerobatics display team performed a spectacular fly-over past one of the county’s most famous landmarks, The Wrekin Hill.

In their trademark diamond formation, an aerobatic team (pictured) soared across the sky, leaving crowds of people wowed by the performance.

Shropshire Star reporter Lorna Paterson said: “There was a good turnout of over 150 people and it was nice how the weather cleared minutes before the Red Arrows arrived.”

The Star handed out free bottles of champagne to the first 40 people present at the flypast, staged in appreciation of its community sponsorship, which includes supporting the annual RAF Cosford airshow.

The paper is also planning a week-long series of celebrations, including a special anniversary edition and four special supplements looking at how the paper and the area it serves has grown over the past four decades.

It will also reprint an extract from the original first edition, and give away 40 prizes each day for a week.

The first edition of the Shropshire Star (below) rolled off the presses on October 5, 1964, and was the first new evening newspaper launched in the post-war years.

The launch came in the wake of the announcement that East Shropshire was to be the site of a new town – Dawley New Town, the forerunner of Telford.

At the time, the Wolverhampton-based Express & Star, now the Star’s sister paper, published a special Shropshire edition, and so it inherited a nightly circulation of 19,000.

This soon grew and now stands at around 80,000, with eight editions published six days a week.

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