revealed that planning permission had been granted for a total of 1,167 homes across the town, meaning its population was expected to grow by 50 per cent by 2020. The town's branch of Barclays Bank was targeted by robbers on 6 May 1991. They drilled into the strongroom and escaped with £50,000. The same bank was subject to armed robberies in March 2013 and March 2017. Its closure was announced a few weeks after the latter, leaving Shifnal without a bank for the first time since 1824. In 2009 one of the town's biggest employers, Wrekin Construction, went into administration with the loss of 420 jobs in Shropshire, Yorkshire, Northamptonshire and Cheshire and more than £45 million to creditors. Among the business's assets was the Gem of Tanzania, valued on the business's balance sheets at £11 million. However it emerged that the 2 kg uncut stone's value had been forged and it was eventually sold for just £8,000. In late 2018 plans for a second, far larger expansion of Shifnal, were revealed by Shropshire Council. The proposals, which caused considerable local controversy and led to a public meeting, included up to another 1,500 homes, 40 hectares of employment land and a bypass south of the town by 2036. Large areas of farmland would be needed for the development. Culture The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, about the English Romantic movement was based on a manuscript discovered in Shifnal. The collection of collection of ballads and popular songs, collected by Bishop Thomas Percy and published in 1765, was primarily based on a folio discovered at the Shifnal home of Percy's friend Humphrey Pitt. It was on the floor, and Pitt's maid had been using the leaves to light fires. Once rescued Percy used forty-five of the ballads in the folio for his book of 180, adding others from sources - broadside ballads collected by diarist Samuel Pepys and Collection of Old Ballads published in 1723, possibly by Ambrose Philips. Percy was encouraged to publish by his friends Samuel Johnson and the poet William Shenstone, who also found and contributed ballads. Percy's Reliques caught the public imagination, inspiring poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth to compose their own imitations, and inspired Sir Walter Scott. The book is credited, in part, with changing the literary movement of the 18th century from Neo-Classicism, into Romanticism, highlighting the simpler, less artificial traditions