Some years ago, I organised a tour of the Black Country for a group of friends. This is my record of the experience:
When charged with the task of arranging a short walking holiday for a well-travelled group of baby-boomers, all used to striding out over scenic routes such as Portugal’s Peneda-Gerês, the foothills of the Spanish Pyrenees in La Garrotxa, around Lake Bled in Slovenia or along the Lycian Trail in Antalya, it is safe to say that not many would think that a trip centred on Dudley in the West Midlands would be viable proposition. Rather Dudley, like much of the Black Country, is considered the epitome of Brexit Britain – a post-industrial town riddled with poverty and resentment, discarded and left to rot by a metropolitan elite more concerned with lining their own pockets than the destiny of those regions which had previously been the bulwark of the nation’s prosperity.
Well, maybe, but there is another side to the Black Country – a region proud and protective of its history and anxious to share its heritage and achievements with the world. And much more as well: immense loveliness lies in the hidden waterways that wind through the area; the pubs offer real ales from a host of micro-brewers selling craft beers, all established generations before anyone knew what a micro-brewery or a craft beer was. There is also an outcrop of limestone hills, thrown up 428 million years ago (just imagine that), providing a fertile ground for fossil hunters, almost on a par with the Jurassic Coast. Above all, there is an important and lasting social story, illustrated in outstanding living museums. Put together, I could see the possibilities of a trip as varied as a safari up the Orinoco.
The Black Country itself is an area centred on Dudley to the west of (and culturally distinct from) Birmingham. Its precise borders are a matter of dispute and everyone seems to carry their own internal map of where it limits lie. For most, the core is the coal and limestone rich area around Dudley, including small towns such as Brierley Hill, Sedgley, the Gornals, Quarry Bank and Cradley Heath. Then there is the outer circle including larger industrial towns – Walsall, Wolverhampton (actually a city), West Bromwich, Halesowen and Stourbridge. Finally there are the borderland with Birmingham including Smethwick and Oldbury. These days, it is sometimes defined by the Metropolitan Boroughs of Dudley, Walsall, Sandwell and Wolverhampton, though this tends to stretch the boundaries beyond previously recognised limits.
The name ’Black Country’ itself is of uncertain origin, its first use being recorded in 1840. Perhaps it was to do with coal being near the surface, perhaps the effect of filthy smoke polluting the sky – an apocryphal story suggests that Queen Victoria insisted on the blinds of her railway carriage being pulled down while she passed through the area. What we do know is that the expression was popularised by the nineteenth century American traveller Elihu Burritt’s who wrote a book called Walks in the Black Country and described the region as being “black by day and red by night”. The area also attracted the attention of JMW Turner who visited Dudley in 1830 in search of images illustrating the Industrial Revolution. He produced a famous watercolour which shows the castle and church in the background, symbols of traditional life, and furnaces and canal boats in the foreground, illustrating the dramatic changes that were taking place throughout the country.
The region is particularity famous for its dialect, considered by some to be the last haven of the Mercian tongue. The basic accent is similar in some ways to that of neighbouring Birmingham, but with sing-song rhythm to it, in a similar manner to modern Norwegian. This is complicated though by distinctive vowel pronunciation – for example ‘a’ often becomes ‘o’ so apple is pronounced opple, man as mon; the “ea” in peas and tea is replaced by an “ay” sound, resulting in these words being pronounced as pays and tay. Also there are unique dialect words such as lezzer for meadow and fittle for food; most famously, bostin’ means very good. It all adds to the unique character of the area.
The first day of our trip was built around a canal walk starting at the Bumble Hole Nature Reserve near Netherton. This is a former coal mining site, now beautified and equipped with a visitor centre run by volunteers. We were delighted to be provided with a brilliant impromptu talk about the local industry and its most famous commission, the manufacture of the chain and anchor for the Titanic. The walk passed by two remarkable canal tunnels (Dudley and Netherton), the spectacular Parkhead Viaduct, originally designed by Brunel, before passing by the Merry Hill Shopping Centre (built on the site of the once-mighty Round Oak Steel works). In the unlikely location of Brierley Hill, hidden from passing traffic, is to be found the spectacular and beautiful Delph Lock flight, a steep run of eight locks which, to me, are the eighth wonder of the world.
The walk concluded at Stourbridge, a town famous for its lead crystal and giving us the opportunity to visit one of the only four surviving glass cones in the country. The glassworks is a reminder that the Black Country is famous not only for metal-work and furnaces but for skill and artistry too. Lead crystal cut-glass is not fashionable these days but for many older generations, a few pieces of cut glass were the one luxury item that most could afford to own, use and take pride in. Its beauty can still be appreciated; no matter how old it is, it retains it diamond-like sparkle and can thus can be handed from one generation to another.
The canal walk was followed by the first of many memorable pub visits. The Old Swan at Netherton, universally known as Ma Pardoe’s, was by 1971, one of only four brewpubs left in the country – that is to say, pubs that brewed their own beer solely for consumption on the premises. Well, it’s still going today, similar décor, the same beautiful enamel ceiling, the same beer and, very possibly, the same clientele. The two other pubs which form the golden triad of Black Country brewing are the Beacon Hotel at Sedgley, home of Sarah Hughes Brewery and The Bull and Bladder (more correctly, The Vine) at Brierley Hill, the brewery tap for the magnificent Batham’s bitter. All these places resonate with the warmth and atmosphere of true originals; businesses which had not changed with the times, not through indolence but because they know change does not always mean improvement.
The day concluded though with two very different pubs – the self-consciously quirky, but brilliantly run MAD O’Roukes Pie Factory for dinner and later, the Trumpet in Bilston where live jazz in can be heard seven nights a week. Resident there on Mondays and Fridays is Reg Keirle, now in his eighties and a veteran of innumerable performances over a lifetime of piano playing; I first heard him 40 years ago. He was the inspiration behind one of 1970’s Rock band Slade’s biggest hits – Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me – after Jim Lea and Don Powell saw him perform on a Sunday night at The Trumpet itself.
Day two looked at a different aspect of the area – its geological foundation. Reaching north out of Dudley are a series of limestone hills, thrown up over 400 million years ago in the Silurian period of geological history. The Dudley area, and much of the Midlands, was at that time covered by a shallow tropical sea in which there were coral reefs. Gradually the shells of sea creatures settled on the lime rich mud of the sea floor. In time this mud became limestone whilst the shells were preserved as fossils. Immense earth movements squeezed the rocks into huge folds, making the four hills that we were to walk. All the hills have been quarried in the past. In early times the stone was used for building, notably at Dudley Priory and Dudley Castle. Later it was discovered that lime, made by burning limestone in kilns, was a good fertiliser. During the Industrial Revolution, limestone was used in the iron industry as a ‘flux’ to absorb impurities from the molten ore.
Today, a five mile walk over the hills reveals many relics of the mineworking as well as an amazing opportunity for fossil hunting on the largest of the hills, Wren’s Nest, which was declared the UK’s first National Nature Reserve for geology in 1956. Miners in the limestone workings were wont to smuggle out any fossils they found and sell them to geologists – they could earn more from one decent fossil than from a year’s wages. To this day, no symbol is more closely associated with Dudley than the calymene blumenbachii, a species of trilobite only found in the limestone of the area and nicknamed the Dudley bug. The walk finished near the spectacular Beacon Tower just past The Beacon Hotel.
Day three was built around a visit to the five star tourist attractions, The Black Country Museum and the adjacent Dudley Canal Trust. The canal trust provides trips in the Dudley canal which was excavated in the eighteenth century to help work in the limestone mines of Castle Hill; the cut was later taken all the way through the hill to enable the Dudley to Stourbridge canal line to be built. After being left delict in the post-war era, the canal was revived by volunteers in the 1970’s who eventually added further tunnels of their own to enable a circular trip to be offered to tourists. The tunnels have no towpath, so the old method of propulsion through tunnels – legging – can be demonstrated. The enormous caverns left by the mines have a unique atmosphere and great acoustics and have been used for concerts for more than a century.
The Black Country Museum itself also originates in the 1970’s – the time when the last vestiges of traditional industry were disappearing under the Thatcher government. It was then that the process of memorialising the Black Country began and the Museum was at the heart of it. Important buildings facing demolition were dismantled and brought to the site in Tipton and re-erected to form a kind of show-village, compete with high street, school. Chapel, workshops, pub, housing, fair and even a coal-mine. Demonstrations of skills are given by volunteers and the coal mine can still be visited. Wonderful though the buildings are, it is never entirely possible to forget the bestial conditions many had to endure while making nails and chains in their back yards. These were called cottage industries, an expression which evokes thatched roofs and honeysuckle but the reality was poverty and early death. Nowhere is the harshness more evident than in the dark, constrained, frightening atmosphere of the mine.
The heroism and spirit of the workers is reflected in The Workers’ Institute building, moved from Cradley Heath and now a café. This building was originally erected with the unspent element of a fund raised to finance the women’s chain-makers’ strike of 1910. This was a landmark event in British industrial relations which had a lasting and positive impact on workers’ pay throughout the country. The building itself still speaks eloquently about the determination of working people to achieve a better way of life. Another spectacular building is the former Rolfe Street Baths, a striking example of late nineteenth century civic architecture where, many years ago, I learned to swim. Now it is serves as a conference centre to the museum.
A word too for somewhere we were unable to fit in. Dudley Zoo was created in 1937 on the slopes of the hill at the centre of the town which is still topped by the ruins of a Norman Castle. Zoos are not always popular in the modern world, but it is important to see some context. This Zoo was revolutionary in having no cages and using the best of modern architecture; the architects were Berthold Lubetkin’s modernist Tecton group. The buildings at the zoo, some of which have been recently restored and are the best surviving collection of Lubetkin’s work, were intended to employ new visions and technology to the service of the general population. No longer were great buildings to be the preserve of the aristocracy – they were for all. And it worked too, the zoo was a sensation; 250,000 visited on its opening day, 700,000 in its first year. The zoo became an irradicable part of the childhood memory of many from the area and still flourishes today.
So was this unlikely holiday a success? It certainly was. We saw much that was fascinating and even lovely, enjoyed many brilliant hostelries and learned a lot about the spirit of the area – what Archie Hill called “the clenched fist of certain, sure, achieved, defiance.”
Detailed itinerary: http://www.john-price.me.uk/BCE.pdf