The Black Country is a loosely defined area of England's West Midlands. It is mainly urban, covering most of the Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton metropolitan boroughs. The road between Wolverhampton and Birmingham was described as "one continuous town" in 1785.
The area was one of the Industrial Revolution's birthplaces. Its name was first recorded in the 1840s, and derives either from the coal seam close to the surface or the production of coal, coke, iron, glass, bricks and steel which produced high levels of soot and air pollution.
Extent
The Black Country has no single set of defined boundaries. Some traditionalists define it as "the area where the coal seam comes to the surface – so West Bromwich, Oldbury, Blackheath, Cradley Heath, Old Hill, Bilston, Dudley, Tipton, Wednesbury, and parts of Halesowen, Walsall and Smethwick or what used to be known as Warley." There are records from the 18th century of shallow coal mines in Wolverhampton, however."RR Angerstein's Illustrated Travel Diary 1753–55" Others have included areas slightly outside the coal field which were associated with heavy industry.
Walsall and Wolverhampton’s Black Country status was secure throughout the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, with Arthur Mee positing that Wolverhampton was the “capital of The Black Country” in The King's England: Staffordshire (1937). Both boroughs were expanded to include increasingly suburban outskirts, which may have influenced the Dudley-centric publication The BlackCountryMan (and later, the Black Country Bugle) to perpetuate the idea that neither borough was part of the region (although the Bugle now includes content on all four boroughs). The towns of Dudley and Tipton are today generally considered to be the centre.
Bilston-born Samuel Griffiths, in his 1876 Griffiths Guide to the Iron Trade of Great Britain, stated: "The Black Country commences at Wolverhampton, extends a distance of sixteen miles to Stourbridge, eight miles to West Bromwich, penetrating the northern districts through Willenhall to Bentley, The Birchills, Walsall and Darlaston, Wednesbury, Smethwick and Dudley Port, West Bromwich and Hill Top, Brockmoor, Wordsley and Stourbridge. As the atmosphere becomes purer, we get to the higher ground of Brierley Hill, nevertheless here also, as far as the eye can reach, on all sides, tall chimneys vomit forth great clouds of smoke".
Today the term commonly refers to the majority of the four metropolitan boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton although it is said that "no two Black Country men or women will agree on where it starts or ends"."Birmingham and the Black Country are neighbouring areas located in the English West Midlands. ... The Black Country has no agreed physical or political boundaries being defined instead of what is it is not, and primarily, by its residents, in opposition to the neighbouring large city of Birmingham" .
Local government
Official use of the name came in 1987 with the Black Country Development Corporation, an urban development corporation covering Sandwell and Walsall, which was disbanded in 1998. The Black Country Consortium (founded in 1999) and the Black Country Local Enterprise Partnership (founded in 2011) both define the Black Country as the four metropolitan boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton, an approximate area of .
Cultural and industrial definition The borders of the Black Country can be defined by using the special cultural and industrial characteristics of the area. Areas around the canals (the cut) which had mines extracting mineral resources and heavy industry refining these are included in this definition. Cultural parameters include unique or characteristic foods such as groaty pudding, grey peas and bacon, faggots, gammon or pork hocks and pork scratchings; Black Country humour; and the Black Country dialect.
Geological definitions
The Black Country Society defines the borders as the area on the coal seam, regardless the depth of the seam. This definition includes West Bromwich and Oldbury, which had many deep pits, and Smethwick. The thick coal that underlies Smethwick was not mined until the 1870s and Smethwick has retained more Victorian character than most West Midland areas.J. Fletcher, ‘What is the Black Country’, The Blackcountryman 1(1) (1967), 11-13 Sandwell Park Colliery's pit was located in Smethwick and had 'thick coal' as shown in written accounts from 1878. Coal was also heavily mined in Hamstead, further east, whose workings extended well under what is now north Birmingham. Smethwick and Dudley Port were described as "a thousand swarming hives of metallurgical industries" by Samuel Griffiths in 1872.
Another geological definition, the seam outcrop definition, only includes areas where the coal seam is shallow, making the soil black at the surface. Some coal mining areas to the east and west of the geologically defined Black Country are therefore excluded by this definition because the coal here is too deep down and does not outcrop. The seam outcrop definition excludes areas in North Worcestershire and South Staffordshire.
Toponymy
The first recorded use of the term "the Black Country" may be from a toast given by a Mr Simpson, town clerk to Lichfield, addressing a Reformer's meeting on 24 November 1841, published in the Staffordshire Advertiser. He describes going into the "black country" of Staffordshire – Wolverhampton, Bilston and Tipton.
In published literature, the first reference dates from 1846 and occurs in the novel Colton Green: A Tale of the Black Country by the Reverend William Gresley, who was then a prebendary of Lichfield Cathedral. Gresley's opening paragraph starts "On the border of the agricultural part of Staffordshire, just before you enter the dismal region of mines and forges, commonly called the 'Black Country', stands the pretty village of Oakthorpe", "commonly" implying that the term was already in use. He also writes that "the whole country is blackened with smoke by day, and glowing with fires by night", and that "the 'Black Country' ... is about twenty miles in length and five in bredth reaching from north to south".
The phrase was used again, though as a description rather than a proper noun, by the Illustrated London News in an 1849 article on the opening of the South Staffordshire Railway. An 1851 guidebook to the London and North Western Railway included an entire chapter entitled "The Black Country", including an early description:
This work was also the first to explicitly distinguish the area from nearby Birmingham, noting that "On certain rare holidays these people wash their faces, clothe themselves in decent garments, and, since the opening of the South Staffordshire Railway, take advantage of cheap excursion trains, go down to Birmingham to amuse themselves and make purchases."
The geologist Joseph Jukes made it clear in 1858 that he felt the meaning of the term was self-explanatory to contemporary visitors, remarking that "It is commonly known in the neighbourhood as the 'Black Country', an epithet the appropriateness of which must be acknowledged by anyone who even passes through it on a railway". Jukes based his Black Country on the seat of the great iron manufacture, which for him was geographically determined by the ironstone tract of the coalfield rather than the thick seam, running from Wolverhampton to Bloxwich, to West Bromwich, to Stourbridge and back to Wolverhampton again. A travelogue published in 1860 made the connection more explicit, calling the name "eminently descriptive, for blackness everywhere prevails; the ground is black, the atmosphere is black, and the underground is honeycombed by mining galleries stretching in utter blackness for many a league". An alternative theory for the meaning of the name is proposed as having been caused by the darkening of the local soil due to the outcropping coal and the seam near the surface.
It was however the American diplomat and travel writer Elihu Burritt who brought the term "the Black Country" into widespread common usage with the third, longest and most important of the travel books he wrote about Britain for American readers, his 1868 work Walks in The Black Country and its Green Borderland. Burritt had been appointed United States consul in Birmingham by Abraham Lincoln in 1864, a role that required him to report regularly on "facts bearing upon the productive capacities, industrial character and natural resources of communities embraced in their Consulate Districts" and as a result travelled widely from his home in Harborne, largely on foot, to explore the local area. Burritt's association with Birmingham dated back 20 years and he was highly sympathetic to the industrial and political culture of the town as well as being a friend to many of its leading citizens, so his portrait of the surrounding area was largely positive. He was the author of the famous early description of the Black Country as "black by day and red by night", adding appreciatively that it "cannot be matched, for vast and varied production, by any other space of equal radius on the surface of the globe". Burritt used the term to refer to a wider area than its common modern usage, however, devoting the first third of the book to Birmingham, which he described as "the capital, manufacturing centre, and growth of the Black Country", and writing "plant, in imagination, one foot of your compass at the Town Hall in Birmingham, and with the other sweep a circle of twenty miles [30 km] radius, and you will have, 'the Black Country" (this area includes Coventry, Kidderminster and Lichfield).
History
A few Black Country places such as Wolverhampton, Bilston and Wednesfield are mentioned in Anglo-Saxon charters and chronicles and the forerunners of a number of Black Country towns and villages such as Cradley, Dudley, Smethwick, and Halesowen are included in the Domesday Book of 1086. At this early date, the area was mostly rural. A monastery was founded in Wolverhampton in the Anglo-Saxon period and a castle and priory was built at Dudley during the period of Norman rule. Another religious house, Premonstratensian Abbey of Halesowen, was founded in the early 13th century. A number of Black Country villages developed into market towns and boroughs in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, notably Dudley, Walsall and Wolverhampton. Coal mining was carried out for several centuries in the Black Country, starting from medieval times, and metalworking was important in the Black Country area as early as the 16th century spurred on by the presence of iron ore and coal in a seam thick, the thickest seam in Great Britain, which outcropped in various places. The first recorded blast furnace in the Black Country was built at West Bromwich in the early 1560s. Many people had an agricultural smallholding and supplemented their income by working as nailers or smiths, an example of a phenomenon known to economic historians as proto-industrialisation. In 1583, the accounts of the building of Henry VIII's Nonsuch Palace record that nails were supplied by Reynolde Warde of Dudley at a cost of 11s 4d per thousand. By the 1620s "Within ten miles [16 km] of Dudley Castle there were 20,000 smiths of all sorts".
In the early 17th century, Dud Dudley, a natural son of the Baron of Dudley, experimented with making iron using coal rather than charcoal. Two patents were granted for the process: one in 1621 to Lord Dudley and one in 1638 to Dud Dudley and three others. In his work Metallum Martis, published in 1665, he claimed to have "made Iron to profit with Pit-cole". However, considerable doubt has been cast on this claim by later writers.