Midlands – East of Elveden

August 22, 2025

Dudley Ay It

We were driving home from North Wales, and it is a long way to East Anglia from there. So we were looking for a break in the journey somewhere: a place to rest overnight before A14-ing onwards to Norwich? While it might not be everybody’s destination of choice, Dudley, de facto capital of England’s Black Country, has some points in its favour, its West Midlands location midway between coasts being one of them. Besides, I wanted to have a look at Wren’s Nest, the geopark on the town outskirts, where all manner of weird and wonderful fossils from the Silurian period might be found.

I had been here before, several years earlier, a brief stop on a coast to coast pilgrimage that I wrote about in my book Westering. Back then I had passed through Dudley as I traced my way through the Birmingham – Black Country conurbation by way of its extensive canal network; an interesting route, although Venice didn’t spring very much to mind as I traipsed westwards through a decayed, post-industrial landscape.

I wrote then:

I arrived at a large, five-way roundabout and a dual-carriageway, which I followed further uphill towards Dudley Castle, which I could see, noble but not entirely fairytale, flying its flag on top of the hill ahead. The next roundabout held several large, Black Country-themed sculptures: a steel crucible, bronze cannon, heraldic lion and medieval plough. It looked as if Dudley was doing its best to make the most of its industrial heritage. I wanted to take a closer look but was stuck on the wrong side of the dual carriageway with no safe means of crossing. Eventually, I spotted a footbridge ahead that conveniently led me straight to Dudley’s bus station at the foot of Castle Hill, an outcrop of the Wenlock Group limestone that had played a significant part in the town’s industrial development.

This time, coming from Wales by way of Shrewsbury and Telford, we came upon this same roundabout as we were driving around looking for the hotel we had booked for the night. Travelodge found, and bags deposited, we went off in search of food and drink. A peremptory Google search of the vicinity revealed a pub close to the castle that might be a possibility but when we arrived at the Fellows things didn’t look very promising. A tribute singer was belting out a cover of Red Red Wine by UB40 at deafening volume and the courtyard was packed with smokers who were intent on avoiding the aural onslaught inside. Besides, it was Sunday evening and the availability of lunchtime roasts had been and gone. It looked as if we would have to try elsewhere.

On the way up to the Fellows we had passed an even more unpromising establishment on Castle Hill, a single-roomed place that called itself the Star Bar, which resembled more a garage lock-up than a place for food and drink, although the former was clearly available as boisterous yam yam* voices echoed from behind it half-closed metal portal. Also on Castle Hill was a once-splendid Art Deco cinema that now served as a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall. Next door, a Tudor Gothic pile had similarly been converted to serve as a place of worship for the town’s Muslim community: Dudley Central Mosque. The building, I found out later, was Grade II-listed and had once been a school.

* yam yam = Black Country dialect

Across the road from the Fellows, a grand statue of the First Earl of Dudley stood at the top of the town’s pedestrianised shopping zone and market place. A little further on we passed St Edmund’s Church, an 18th-century replacement of earlier place of worship of Anglo-Saxon origin destroyed in the Civil War. To symbolise its dedication, twin crowns and the arrows of the saint’s martyrdom were on display in front of the church entrance.

This being Sunday evening, the area was largely deserted; its market stalls locked up, although some of the shop fronts gave the impression of having been closed up for some time. There were several interesting statues scattered about to restore some sense of civic pride. Most notable of these was that of local football hero Duncan Edwards. Born in Dudley in 1936, Edwards had been a Manchester United ‘Busby Babe’ and highly respected England defender before dying tragically, aged just 21, from injuries sustained in the 1958 Munich Air Disaster. Further down, just beyond the market place, was a life-size bronze statue of a top-hatted Victorian gentleman sitting on a bench: the poet Ben Boucher (1769 – 1851), who wrote ‘Lines on Dudley Market’, some of which were etched into the curved Portland stone bench. While Boucher lived a much longer life than the unfortunate footballer, the Dudley Poet’s own sad fate was to end up impoverished in the town workhouse.

This brief glimpse of the town centre reinforced the impression I had taken from my previous visit: one of decline and closure, one of faded glory. The re-purposing of grand old buildings; the closure of town centre shops and department stores – out-competed ever since the opening of Merry Hill Shopping Centre at nearby Brierley Hill towards the end of the last century. Counter to this sense of decline were the upbeat Town Trail pavement plaques that told with pride the town’s unique geological and industrial history. It was here in the Black Country that the Industrial Revolution had originated and then swiftly gained momentum in the late 18th century. A serendipitous convergence of factors had come into play. The area had all the necessary raw materials – coal, limestone and iron ore. It had – or, rather, soon acquired – the labour, skills and engineering talent. It also had the means of distribution – canals, and later railways. It could even be argued that the Anthropocene – the recent epoch in which human activity has been the dominant factor in changing the world around us – began hereabouts. I touch upon this in the final chapter of my recent book Flint Country, where I write:

The precise date of its onset remains a matter of debate. James Lovecock, originator of the Gaia concept, claims that the Anthropocene started with the Industrial Revolution in the early nineteenth century, the period in modern history when the use of fossil fuels for manufacturing and transport got fully underway. Fine-tuning this connection between the dominance of human influence and technological progress, it could even be said that the Anthropocene began with the invention of Thomas Newcomen’s steam-powered pump, a machine first used to remove water from a coal mine near Dudley in the English Black Country in 1712.

Next morning we made our way to Wren’s Nest, where I noticed that the suburban streets approaching the site had pleasingly apposite names like Silurian Mews and Fossil View. It was a grey, overcast, not-very-warm-for-August sort of day, and the site was fairly quiet apart from a couple of dog-walkers and kids on bikes. At the entrance, an information board gave us the lowdown on the site’s remarkable geological pedigree. Wren’s Nest is effectively a 428 million-year-old tropical seabed that was once covered by coral reefs and uplifted within the Much Wenlock limestone that gifted this region its industrial resources.

The prize fossil here is a species of trilobite, Calymene bumenbachii, known colloquially as the ‘Dudley Bug’, which looks like a scarily, super-sized woodlice, although it is more closely related to modern day crabs. To find one of these would have made me very happy but they proved to be elusive. What I did find after an hour and a half of turning over scree were several bits of coral and all manner of fossilised brachiopod shells. Best of all was a small flat piece of rock embedded with dozens of tiny shells: a fragment of ancient sea floor that revealed a microcosm of life 428 million years ago, a time when the existing continents were yet to separate and the territory of what would become the British Isles lay south of the Equator. To contemplate such scales of time and distance takes the breath away. William Blake wrote of seeing ‘the world in a grain of sand’. Here you could see a long-vanished world in a small piece of rock.

We left the car park and drove northeast through Tipton and Wednesbury to reach the M6 with its relentless parade of thundering traffic. It was a timely reminder that we were now firmly back in the age of man and machine, the Anthropocene. In comparison with the aeons that had passed since the fossils of Wren’s Nest were deposited at the bottom of a tropical ocean, the 19th-century heyday of the Industrial Revolution in the Black Country with its smoke, red-sky furnaces and metal-clanging workshops was as if just yesterday.

September 21, 2023

Ghost Factory

Much of the fabric of Birmingham’s history is, like the city’s modest river, the oft-culverted Rea, half-hidden or tucked away from sight. Occulted beneath flyovers and underpasses, the city’s past flows sluggishly beneath redundant factories and car parks. Unconvincingly disguised, and with the vaguest hint of rusting metal, it escapes as vapour from drains and manholes. It goes with the territory: this is a city where there is a strong tendency for destroying evidence of the past, of knocking things down only to build them again in rearranged form. As the city’s coat of arms proclaims in its simple motto, it is the Birmingham tradition – ‘Forward!’ The subtext is ‘Don’t Look Back!’ The past is bulldozed. Even so, modern high-rise Birmingham, brash and shiny though it may be, is replete with ghosts of the past, of industry, of once busy factories and workshops. The whole city is a ghost factory.

These days there is a new-found reverence for some of Birmingham’s more iconic anti-heroes. Peaky Blinders with its skewed myth-making has afforded the city some retro-gangster glamour, while established city brands like Black Sabbath have become the stuff of legend. Now there is even a Black Sabbath Bridge on Broad Street spanning the canal, where the likenesses of Aston’s own heavy metallists – Geezer, Bill, Ozzy and Tony – are immortalised on a bench (iron, naturally). Who’d have thought that in the halcyon days of my Birmingham Town Hall gig-going youth it would be faux-demonic Black Sabbath who would be chosen as the musical emblem of the city? My money would probably have been on the Moody Blues or Roy Wood.

In Victoria Square, the neoclassical Town Hall is just as I remember it, all pale stone and Corinthian columns, but its immediate surroundings have changed dramatically in recent years. A tram line now passes in front of it that follows a route through the Black Country to Wolverhampton, somewhere that seems exotically distant from this city centre ground zero. Between the town hall and the tram tracks stands Antony Gormley’s Iron:Man, a six-metre-tall leaning metal figure that pays tribute to Birmingham’s erstwhile industry, its original heavy metal heritage.

Head downhill from Victoria Square, past the stainless steel, baking foil roof of New Street station, past the aluminium-disc-clad blobitecture of Selfridges, through the Southside district and the areas that are now marked on maps as Gay Village and Chinatown. Soon you’ll arrive at the former industrial district of Digbeth, which nowadays is probably the closest thing Birmingham has to a Bohemian quarter. This part of the city is actually the oldest quarter, the location of the original Saxon village at a ford on the River Rea, around which the satanic mills of Victorian Birmingham would later cluster.

Digbeth High Street is in a state of flux, one side of it enclosed in chain-link. Gentrification might be too strong a term, but Digbeth is undergoing change: empty factory sites are being cleared to await new development. Tram tracks are being laid down; pavements are being widened and made pedestrian-friendly, flower beds are being set out awaiting planting. The side streets that slope down beneath the railway arches are lined with one-time industrial buildings that have morphed into event spaces – ghost factories stand at every corner. The wall murals that abound have already been here long enough to develop a patina of age. As I wrote in an earlier post, the transformation has already been going on for several years.

Digbeth is the location for Supersonic, an annual festival of experimental music that celebrated its twentieth anniversary this year. Supersonic is by no means a heavy metal festival but the spirit of Black Sabbath permeates like a benign, if mischievous, presence. Performances take place in two neighbouring buildings, one of which served as a warehouse in a previous life. Dark clothing is almost de rigueur, as are Sunn O))) T-shirts. Light-hearted doom is perhaps the oxymoron that best fits an atmosphere that I can only describe as feel-good apocalyptic. The music is loud but the mood is calm; the ethic is kind, inclusive and super-friendly. Perhaps it helps that this is Birmingham. Would it be the same in Manchester or London?

The Sunday night headliners Lankum play a glorious set of drone-laden alt-folk to an ecstatic crowd. Alternating between heart-rending murder ballads, frantic Irish jigs and dark sea shanties, the music veers from gentle to violent, from elegiac to almost frightening. In one of the between-song chats with the audience, guitarist Daragh Lynch mentions that he was delighted to discover that both of Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler’s parent’s were Irish and concludes from this that heavy metal must therefore be an Irish invention. We all laugh. But Birmingham, and especially Digbeth, did once have a sizeable Irish presence. It’s all part of Birmingham’s proud black, white and brown cosmopolitanism. The city was built on metal and people. Iron Man (Black Sabbath); Iron:Man (Antony Gormley) are both worthy tributes. While Birmingham’s iron has rusted to be replaced by stainless steel and aluminium, its people shine on.

September 26, 2021September 27, 2021

Black Country

Here is another brief extract from my book Westering that was published earlier this year by Saraband. This time it concerns my transit on foot through the territory of the Black Country that lies to the west of Birmingham. I have included a few black and white images to illustrate the text here. These are not in the book itself but might help give a flavour of what the area is like.

Extract from Chapter 15 – City of Metal

Here was the Black Country and now I was walking on sunshine: the sunshine that lay captured in carbon in the earth below. The sunshine trapped by swampy tropical forests of trees and ferns that, over tens of millions of years of compression, had transformed to a solid energy-rich fuel source; the black rock that set the Industrial Revolution in motion around two hundred years ago – a period of time that on the geological scale of things was little more than a blink of an eye.

Thanks to the thirty-foot-thick seam of coal beneath the ground, Oldbury was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. Four blast furnaces operated in its vicinity between the 1780s and 1860s but, as the fortunes of coal mining and steel-making declined in the region in the late 19th century, brick-making took over, exploiting the deposits of Etruria marl that were also found in abundance beneath the coal seam. The town’s underlying geology was generous to a fault: the clay was perfect for manufacturing Staffordshire blue brick, a hard-wearing, non-porous brick ideal for use in foundations, bridges, steps and tunnels – the essential hardware of Black Country business. Tar distilling, chemical manufacturing and boiler-making industries also took root in the district later on. The inevitable result was a besmirched landscape – a ‘black country’ – an environment littered with spoil heaps, abandoned quarries, cavernous marl pits and unbridled chemical pollution. In its heyday, the Black Country had been highly productive – a soot-blasted territory of glowing foundries and clanging metal – but now that energy has drained away.

Extract from Chapter 16 – Black over Bill’s Mother’s

At Brierley Hill I came across a new waterfront development complex that was named, somewhat unimaginatively, The Waterfront. It still did not seem quite finished and many of the individuals milling round the car park sported hard hats and high-visibility jackets: surveyors, property developers and the like – the storm troopers of real estate. Merry Hill, a little further along the canal, had a large hotel advertising FAIRYTALE WEDDINGS, a promotion reinforced by a giant love heart inscribed WILL YOU MARRY ME? On the opposite bank was Brewer’s Wharf, a Victorian pub complex that looked as if it had been there since the time that navvies had come over from Ireland to dig the canals. Its tall chimney bore the legend BANKS’S in bold white lettering. Banks’s, the Wolverhampton ale that quenched many a nail-maker’s thirst in these parts – it seemed a shame that the secretive Banksy could not be employed to make some sort of joint venture with his own art here: a Banksy Banks’s.

The vast Merry Hill shopping centre is probably the Black Country’s biggest draw for anyone with a car and a credit card. It has been in business long enough – since the 1980s – for the shopping complex to be as much a fixture on the mental map of those who live in the area as somewhere with deeper historic entitlement, such as Dudley Castle. More like a diurnal new town than a shopping complex, Merry Hill is defiantly self-absorbed – a world unto itself that has little to do with the canal that passes it by or the industrial heritage of the area. Its retail workers know nothing of lung-clogging coal dust or searing hot metal. Their world is one of special offers, stock-taking and refund protocol.

Further along the canal, Nine-Locks Bridge marks the beginning of Delph Locks, a flight of locks – originally nine but eight now – that cascades downhill to the lower country around Stourbridge, whose sprawl of rooftops could now be seen below.

At the bottom was a pub appropriately called The Tenth Lock. This was prime territory for murder ballads. The dark watery world of the locks was a fine setting for tales of drowning and lovers’ trysts gone badly wrong: a Victorian world of smoke and reeking factories, of hard lives; a polluted monochrome world, of choking industrial fogs that played tricks with the vision and mind.

December 20, 2019

All Fall Down

Two weeks ago I read a news article about the demolition of the cooling towers at Ironbridge on the River Severn in Shropshire. Their final demise was witnessed by many who came to see the four great towers collapsing after a controlled detonation. The towers had stood for exactly half a century. Opened in 1969, the power station they belonged to had stopped generating electricity in November 2015. At one time it had provided enough electricity to power the equivalent of 750,000 homes. The space that will be made available by their removal should be sufficient for around 1,000 new homes, a park and ride, a school and leisure facilities.

Before they came down the towers received a musical farewell when Zoë Beyers from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire performed a solo violin piece on one of the tower platforms. The music was elegaic, an echo of the mournfulness felt by local residents and former power station workers for whom the towers had been a large part of their life. Reduced in seconds to a mere imprint of memory, the Ironbridge geography was instantly transformed for those who lived there. Particularly poignant was the fact that a little way downriver was the original Iron Bridge built in 1781, the first major bridge of its kind in the world. It was no stretch of truth to infer that it was here in Shropshire at Ironbridge and nearby Coalbrookdale that the Industrial Revolution really began.

In my, admittedly limited, experience cooling towers have always stood for something. They were markers on the landscape that held deeper meaning than just supersized industrial chimneys. Travelling north up the A1(M), the cluster of eight towers at Ferrybridge in West Yorkshire always seemed to mark an arrival in the North far more effectively than any roadside sign could. Their presence spoke of a cultural transition as much as a geographical one, a shift of emphasis from pastoral to industrial. But these too were earmarked for destruction, and in 2019 five of the towers were demolished. The remaining three will be removed by summer 2021. Similarly, the pair of cooling towers that used to stand outside Sheffield at Tinsley overlooking the M1 motorway always seemed like an omphalos for Don Valley industry – a centre of gravity for the steel, coal, fire and dirt of South Yorkshire. These were of particular significance for me as they were visible from the classroom where, in a previous life, I had my first practical experience as a geography teacher. These twin towers – the ‘salt and pepper pots’ as they were sometimes known – had been redundant since the 1970s, although they managed to remain standing until 2008. Despite a scheme to convert them into giant works of public art they could not be saved. Now they are gone, redacted from the landscape, as are the steel foundries of Sheffield’s Brightside – the industrial endeavour of generations of Sheffield lives reduced to little more than memory and a plaque at a shopping mall

I do not wish to romanticise coal-fired power production – it is undeniably dirty, polluting and a significant contributor to climate change – but I cannot help but find some of the fabric of its production strangely beautiful. Smoke-belching cooling towers may well be the embodiment of Blake’s dark satanic mills but, once abandoned, the heft of their curving brickwork seems to take on an eerie beauty. Silent witnesses of the recent industrial past, their inhuman scale and brooding presence make them emblematic of the hubris that persists in these uncertain times.

May 30, 2018September 30, 2019

Beneath a Concrete Sky – to Gravelly Hill Interchange by canal

Where’s Birmingham river? Sunk.

Which river was it? Two. More or

Less.

Birmingham River Roy Fisher

The idea was to follow the Birmingham canal system north to Spaghetti Junction. I had already traversed the city by means of the Grand Union Canal a couple of years earlier, following the canal path west to arrive at the meeting of the waters at Gas Street Basin. That time I had turned left at Aston Junction but I knew that returning to that same point it would be possible to follow the Birmingham & Fazeley Canal north to reach Salford Junction directly beneath the Gravelly Hill Interchange.

Accompanying me on this venture was my friend Nigel Roberts, a fellow Bradt author devoted to Belarus and Blues (Birmingham City FC) in equal measure, who gamely agreed to come along despite our planned route veering close enough to Aston Villa’s turf to risk bringing him out in hives.

We rendezvoused in the gleaming concourse of New Street Station before making our way to Gas Street Basin by way of Victoria Square with its Queen Vic and Iron:Man statues. A notice on the ever-present temporary fencing that characterises Paradise Circus gave notice that Antony Gormley’s Iron:Man was soon to be moved to a new home. How, I wondered, might this effect the city’s sacred geometry, its unchartered leys that converged at Victoria Square? But Birmingham (motto: ‘Forward’) was always a city that messed with its past, forever rearranging the deckchairs, refurbishing the urban fabric, reinventing the wheel and then re-forging it by means of a Brummagem hammer. It always seemed a place where time not so much stood still as had a frequent lie-down, a place that lump-hammered the past into something that never quite made it to the future.

After a swift half-pint and perusal of the map at the Malt House pub opposite the geographically incongruous Sealife Centre we set off along the Birmingham & Fazeley branch towards Aston Junction. The day is atypically glorious, warm, blue-skied – peak May, the time of year you might happily be time-locked in were it at all possible. Cow parsley froths alongside the canal path, complimenting the blossoming hawthorn. Oxlips, red campion and broom compete for attention with the lurid graffiti that seems to embellish almost any available wall space. Above a lock, daubed high on a factory wall, eponymous Roof Top Vandals have left their mark in neat, bold lettering – a noteworthy combination of art and athleticism. Passing beneath the bridge that feeds railway lines into Snow Hill Station, the shimmering reflected light from the water dances like an electrocardiograph on the concrete above.

Approaching Aston, we pass the red and blue holders of the Saltley Gas Works, scene of the Battle of Saltley Gate some 46 years earlier when the fuel storage depot was mass picketed during a national miners’ strike.

A little further on, we become aware of a familiar figure atop a building – Britannia, complete with trident, excised from the back of a fifty pence piece, supersized and raised to roof level. It seems churlish not to investigate. We detour from the canal to seek out the building and head for the Lichfield Road in the wake of two teenage girls who swig beer from cans and swap yarns in rich Brummo-Caribbean argot. It is, as we thought, a pub; no longer operating as The Britannia but as The Aston Cafe. We are now perilously close to Villa Park, or Vile Park as my companion prefers to call it. It does not bother me either way – I am agnostic in such matters – but Nigel has started to sense that he is well behind enemy lines.

Returning to the canal to press on north, the Gravelly Hill Interchange aka Spaghetti Junction is already clearly visible ahead. The last house before the tangle of overlapping roadways takes over has iron railings decked in Union Jack flags – patriotism doing battle with traffic pollution. Just beyond, a defiant stand of purple lupins, garden escapes gone feral, announces our arrival at Salford Junction. Here we detour left for a short distance along the Tame Valley Canal, the curving multi-carriageway of the M6 immediately above us, articulated lorries flashing by half-seen above the barriers as they career along in compulsive centripetal motion. Above, spanning the roadways, blue signs point the way to London (M1) and The North (M6), while beside the water a navigational signpost for boats shows the various routes out of here – west to Tipton in the Black Country, north to Tamworth in north Warwickshire, back to the City Centre and Gas Street Basin (3½ miles) from whence we have come. But there are no boats today: the troubled pea-green waters beneath the Gravelly Hill Interchange fail to match most people’s criteria of what constitutes an ideal boating holiday.

Huge concrete pillars support the roads overhead – 559 in total if you were foolhardy enough to count them. The pillars bring to mind Pharaonic temples in Upper Egypt – Luxor, Karnak – although hieroglyphs and carved lotus capitals are noticeably absent. But this whole chaotic enclave of concrete, water and channelled momentum is an unintentional temple of sorts – a nexus of late capitalism; a dinosaur footprint of transport and industry, an entropic sump. The water beneath, largely deprived of direct sunlight, is an opaque soup that looks incapable of supporting anything other than menace and monsters but here and there the light sneaks in to highlight graffiti, reflect on the water and cast shapes on the wall that mutate with the sun’s arc: accidental light sculpture, the oeuvre of James Turrell; found land art.

Locked between the various roadways, the trees and bushes of a green island rise defiantly within its looping concrete confines. It is home, no doubt, to all manner of wildlife – birds, pioneering cats… foxes. A Ballardian realm of preposterous nightmares and Sci-fi imaginings, there are probably parts of the Amazon rainforest that are better explored than this singular non-place.

Satiated with the chiaroscuro experience of this interchange underworld, we return to Salford Junction and take the Grand Union Canal south through Nechells to return to the centre via a route best described as elliptical. We pass the vast entertainment complex of Star City, another latter-day temple to mammon; then an enormous recycling plant that has a conveyor belt receiving the load from a Sisyphean procession of tipper trucks, each crushed metal parcel crashing onto the hill-high mound with a shrill clatter. In uncanny juxtaposition to this unholy clamour, set back from the water is a small pond with reeds, yellow iris, water violet and water lilies – a Monet garden awaiting its artist. But for the deafening backdrop, this might be a scene in leafy Warwickshire. Indeed this whole stretch of canal, just a few minutes’ walk from Spaghetti Junction, has a disconcertingly rural feel to it. What is more, it seems almost completely deserted of people.

Reaching Garrison Lane in Bordesley we make another brief detour so that Nigel can show me the location of The Garrison, the pub whose fictional 1920s counterpart is centrepiece to the Peaky Blinders television series. There’s not a peaked cap or Shelby brother to be seen but it offers an opportunity for Nigel to fill his lungs with the right sort of air – St Andrews, Birmingham City’s home ground is only a little way up the hill.

Approaching Digbeth, we finally come upon the elusive River Rea – a shallow, sluggish channel beneath the canal viaduct. One of Birmingham’s two rivers, the other being the River Tame that it merges with close to Gravelly Hill Interchange, the Rea (pronounced ‘Ray’) spends much of its course through the city below ground out of sight. As the poet Roy Fisher claims in Birmingham River, the Rea does little to draw attention to itself: a ‘petty river’ without memory seems about right.

a slow, petty river with no memory

of an ancient

name; a river called Rea, meaning

river,

and misspelt at that.