Black Country Ride No 4 - West Bromwich

Our very own Roving Reporter Dennis revisits the Black Country to find out what's still there and what has changed.

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Black Country Ride No 4 - West Bromwich

Postby Dennis » Thu Nov 05, 2009 8:18 pm

Black Country Ride No. 4

West Bromwich High Street is the kind of thing that can happen when you drop your guard. Somebody whose watch it must have been clearly nodded off long enough for the place to be obliterated and replaced by the longest makeshift souk in Europe. If you knew and loved the town, but had been unavoidably detained for the past forty years in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri, you would need the geophysics of the Time Team to reconstruct the High Street now. I was born in West Bromwich, I used to cycle perilously through it from Whiteheath on my way to Dartmouth Park with a creel balanced on my back and a fishing rod tied to the crossbar - and then all the way home again with a biscuit tin full of tiddlers to restock the Portway canal. (You think I jest...) And there was no need to go to Birmingham to shop - West Bromwich had it all, from Thompson and Rose, opposite St Michael's, where my Auntie Floss used to buy her live eels through Woolworth's, which somehow magically generated hot roasted peanuts, to Hall's bookshop - yes, an actual bookshop, not a magazine rack - where as a teenager I encountered in a lurid paperback Ian Fleming's impossibly suave 007.

The approach along Moor Street is reassuring but could hardly be more deceptive. The blue brick railway bridge, the billiard hall with its confectioner's cream frontage, the handsome church spire - yes, it all seems to be much the same as I remember. But take a few steps further and the entire right-hand side of the street has been erased as irretrievably as if it had become an Einzelobjekt of the Luftwaffe - the whole block, all the shops and as far over as the King's cinema. Hurry on past the municipal art - a giant bedspring with a concrete ice cream cone jammed into it at the top (yes, I agree with you, it's as ugly as it is pointless). Avert your gaze, too, from the vast, desolate bus station. Try to imagine this as it was in, say, the early 1960s, a row of shops which even sold fishing tackle, and with the pavement next to the No. 16 bus stop for Oldbury thronged with Christmas shoppers. Now fade in the track of your choice from Please Please Me...

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View of railway bridge and St Michael's from Moor Street
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Billiard Hall, St Michael Street
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Modern sculpture, St Michael Street

St Michael's church in red brick and stone is an implausibly fine building to find here, exceeded in its grandeur only by the civic buildings. It's perhaps odd that a Roman Catholic church should be one of the most instantly memorable landmarks of the town and should stand where you might expect an Anglican parish church to be, at the intersection of High Street and St Michael Street. It dates from the 1870s, the tower and spire were added in 1911. There's a connection with Lady Diana's family: the first priest in 1832 was George Spencer, youngest son of the 2nd Earl Spencer. I've said a last farewell to at least two of my relatives at St Michael's. The pub opposite, the Goose, is elegant too, with nicely painted wedding cake decorations outside that are almost good enough to eat. But it has the ubiquitous Freehold For Sale sign. (What was the pub called back then?...) Cross over and walk along what remains of New Street (you can no longer drive, buses and taxis only). I had my photo taken somewhere along here when I was three, at Sidney Darby's studio. They unwisely gave me a big - and I mean big - toy MG sports car to hold while I posed. Not understanding the conventions of the photographer's art, I had to be forcibly separated from it and howled all the way home...

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St Michael's R C Church
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The Goose pub

Ah yes, Art. Looming up on my right is a huge new oblong building in a fetching shade of grey with zany cartoon-mouth windows edged in pink. (I'm not making this up.) It looks like an expensive and tasteless birthday card. It's The Public, West Bromwich's latest homage to modernity. I beg its pardon: it's THEpUBLIC. And it cost £50-odd million. Is your reporter feeling strong enough for this? No, not today he's not. Let's save THEpUBLIC for another time. I slink round the back to where the pavement runs out on West Bromwich Ringway - pedestrians are unwelcome behind the Potemkin village façade of Queen's Square shopping mall. I'm now moving parallel to the High Street and heading towards the adult products emporia situated on (somewhat appropriately) Bull Street... No, not really. I want to see if the Belfast Linen Shop at the end of the High Street is still there, where we used to buy bedclothes when I was a child - Take your pick: is the Belfast Linen now heavily disguised as Kebab Grill or Cartridge World? Coming back along the High Street I pick my way through the market stalls as a fine drizzle sets in. Only at the upper levels is there anything worth seeing - principally the tall Burton's building and, next to it, what I think is the old Marks & Spencer's. The devastating pyroplastic flow of late twentieth-century British architecture has consumed this area just as surely as Vesuvius' lava blotted out Herculaneum. You eventually reach St Michael's again with a sense of relief.

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The Public
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Old shops on High Street at old Dartmouth Square
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Market stalls, High Street
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Old Burton's building (right)

It's well worth pushing on further in the direction of Carter's Green. Good buildings start reappearing on both sides of the High Street. The Library and the Town Hall are, from the outside at least, unspoilt. Opposite them there is an entire block of banks and offices which has likewise come through unscathed. Which is more than can be said for Christ Church, it only lasted from the 1820s until 1963 when it was demolished after being damaged by fire. Not a very long life for a church. Its site is now occupied by a Job Centre Plus and a car park, although at least access is still through a lychgate - How sadly prescient of the Victorian sage Matthew Arnold: "The Sea of Faith / Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore / Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. / But now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" (Dover Beach). In fact this was once a town full of religion, and one relic of that time has always intrigued me. On the corner of Sandwell Road is a mysterious painted sign saying "Rechabites". Ever since childhood whenever I went past (my Aunt Mary lived in Carter's Green, beyond the Tower cinema) I'd been trying to understand that strange word using every language I knew, but without success. In fact it turns out that it's from Rechab in the Old Testament (IV Kings, x, 15-28) whose descendants refused to drink wine. The Independent Order of Rechabites was set up in 1835 as a Friendly Society, part of the Christian temperance movement. Before you could be insured or save with the Rechabites, you had to take the Pledge not to drink any alcoholic beverages. So now we know.

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Barclays and old buildings opp Town Hall, High Street
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Public Library
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Town Hall
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Lychgate and site of Christ Church
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Rechabites sign and view towards Carter's Green

I once went to Sandwell Registry Office on an occasion it's hard to forget - to register my father's death. That Registry is housed near the Rechabites sign in one of the most attractive buildings in West Bromwich, Highfields, which dates from about 1830. If I had to choose just one piece of architecture in the town it would be Highfields, it has all the incomparable elegance of late Georgian. (Highfields was once four houses, not one, but let's not split hairs...) And so we go back towards where we started in Moor Street, behind the Town Hall and along Edward Street, past the dreaded District Hospital, always reeking of surgical spirits in the 1950s, and across the railway - now Metro - bridge. To my amazement an old painted advert for tea on the side of a house near the car park is still there, it features a girl in a striped skirt. For some reason I've convinced myself it was Lyons Tea, but it seems to be Twinings. Memory playing tricks again? It can happen in this town.

© Dennis Wood 2009

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Highfields built C1830, now Sandwell Registry Office
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Railway cutting and Lodge Road Metro stop
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Old painted advertisement for tea, Bowater Street

To view full size photos click on individual photos in the gallery - Pages 26 -28 ..........here
Dennis
 
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Re: Black Country Ride - West Bromwich

Postby mallosa » Fri Nov 06, 2009 12:05 pm

It feels like I know the area now Dennis, thankyou! :grin:
If you would like to have your ancestors photo's included in our Gallery, please send me a pm.

Researching: Evans, Rollason, Henley/Hendley, Brookes, Taylor (Wilson - Birmingham)
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Re: Black Country Ride - West Bromwich

Postby Rob » Fri Nov 06, 2009 11:48 pm

Great stuff Dennis.Like the Please Please Me touch.
Backdrop to our lives !!
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Re: Black Country Ride - West Bromwich

Postby Dennis » Sat Nov 07, 2009 6:54 pm

Many thanks, San and Rob. You may find you need a steadying glass of something strong, Rob, if you go to:

http://www.west-bromwich-photos.co.uk/

and scroll down to the photo of the No. 16 bus with the "Drinka Pinta Milka Day" advert on the left. And, further down the same page, the superb colour photo of "Dartmouth Square c 1960s" would moisten the manliest eye...
Dennis
 
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Re: Black Country Ride - West Bromwich

Postby mallosa » Sat Nov 07, 2009 8:05 pm

How fantastic are those Dennis? Thanks for the link :wink:
If you would like to have your ancestors photo's included in our Gallery, please send me a pm.

Researching: Evans, Rollason, Henley/Hendley, Brookes, Taylor (Wilson - Birmingham)
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