Where is the Black Country? You could not find it on the map, could you? The Black Country is the West Midlands region of industrial heartlands. Originally centred on coal mining and ironworking, the Black Country covers Dudley and Wolverhampton and stretches around West Bromwich to Wednesbury and Walsall.
The name is associated with the mid twentieth century, when thousands of furnaces and chimneys filled the air with smoke. This was mining country, a smoking wasteland shaped by underground burning coal and derelict, depleted coal faces.
The industrial might of this region was known the world over. The world’s first successful steam engine for pumping water out of mines was made in Dudley by Thomas Newcomen. The Black Country produced vast quantities of metal goods, and in 1868 the American Consul in Birmingham wrote that the Black Country, black by day and red by night, could not be matched for vast and varied production by any other space of equal radius on the surface of the globe.
Furnaces and foundries worked around the clock, the thundering of machinery and the constant supply of coal fuelling demand, and the Black Country played a prominent role in the Industrial Revolution. It was not without its toll in human life. A visit to the Black Country Living Museum demonstrates what life was like in these times, so hard for us to imagine today.
Today, the Black Country benefits from traditional industries as well as more modern newcomers, and has become a growing tourist attraction in its own right.
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