Tumba also has a High School (Tumba gymnasium) with almost 1.000 students. The Alfa Laval company was founded in Tumba by Gustaf de Laval and remains in the suburb, as does DeLaval, split from Alfa Laval in 1991. Tumba is diverse, with high-rise apartment buildings and single-family houses. Tumba also has a shopping mall, Tumba Centrum, near the railway station.
What makes Tumba different from the communities in northern Botkyrka is that it doesn’t stem from a big farm with historic roots. The people of prehistory preferred to live close to the shores. Tumba was an inland country. That’s why traces of human activity during prehistory are relatively rare. The big change took place during 1755 when the bank of Sweden bought a small farm and started a paper mill. Around the paper mill came a community that developed with its own school and houses for the workers to live in. The next big step was taken when the railroad came in 1860. Soon afterwards a society started to grow around the station house. This society had commerce, police, and a movie theatre. A few houses from that period are still left. In 1894 ‘Separator’ (DeLaval) bought Hamra gård and transformed it into a farm specialized in milk processing. It soon became a big industry. From the beginning these three parts were separate but grew together. The communities of both the papermill and Hamra are well kept.[3]
