The loss of 1,700 jobs as SSI mothballs its plant at Redcar on Teesside is the latest blow to a British steel-making industry that has seen its once proud position now sadly eroded.

For much of the 20th century steel-making was part of the backbone of British industry, employing hundreds of thousands of people in Scotland, the north of England and South Wales.

Steel switched between public and private ownership between the 1930s and the 1960s until in 1967 the Labour government nationalised the industry by forming the British Steel Corporation (BSC) under the Iron and Steel Act.

This brought together the UK's 14 main steel producing companies, putting around 90% of British steelmaking into public ownership and allowing the reshaping of the industry after years of insufficient investment.

The 1970s saw the Government launch a £3 billion, 10-year development strategy to convert BSC from a large number of widespread, small works to a more compact organisation, concentrating steelmaking in five areas - South Wales, Sheffield, Teesside, Scotland and Scunthorpe.

But a world recession and falling demand crippled British Steel, which had continued to increase production, and the 1980s saw a sharp decline in the industry.

The start of the decade saw a 13-week national steel strike, brought on by BSC's pressure for change and a pay dispute, and by the end of 1980 BSC had closed a number of loss-making and outdated plants - reducing its workforce to 130,000, down from 268,500 when the industry was nationalised.

By 1984 BSC was outperforming its continental rivals in terms of labour productivity, and by 1989-90 it was posting a pre-tax profit of £733 million.

But in 1988 Margaret Thatcher privatised BSC, a move which heralded a sharp decline in the industry.

In May 1990 more than 1,100 jobs were axed at the Brymbo steelworks in Wrexham, and in 1992 the Ravenscraig steelworks in Scotland - Europe's largest producer of hot-strip steel - were shut down with the loss of 1,800 jobs. Another 600 jobs were lost at Shotton in Wales.

After reduced demand in the early 1990s, a partial recovery in 1993 and 1994 led to increasing price levels, and British Steel returned to profit.

In 1999 British Steel and Dutch firm Koninklijke Hoogovens joined forces to create Corus, the third largest steelmaker in the world and the biggest in Europe.

But less than a year later Corus announced it was slashing its workforce after making losses of around £20 million a month, leaving only 33,000 steelworkers in the UK.

Corus itself was bought by India's Tata Steel in 2007 for £6.2 billion, and its UK employees accounted for around half of its European workforce.

The Corus plant on Teesside was mothballed in 2010 when an international consortium suddenly walked away from a long-term contract to buy its products, leading to the loss of more than 1,000 jobs.

It was saved when it was bought from Tata Steel by SSI, Thailand's biggest steel producer, in 2011.

But Tata itself endured a tough time during the downturn as demand from construction and car-making dived, forcing thousands of lay-offs and plant closures.

In November 2012 it announced a wave of redundancies to drive down costs, including 600 in South Wales, and six months later plunged into the red with losses of £840 million, wiping £1 billion off the value of its European arm.

Now, with the price of steel almost halving over the past year and over-production flooding the market, the closure at Redcar is the latest shock to the once-famous British industry.