Black Country Tales - Viva Bilstonia!

After visiting the majestic Shugborough estate last week, this time we're a bit more down to earth with a trip to the Black Country town of Bilston (aka Bilstonia) where our friends Liz & Alex will be coming along for the ride. Situated five miles from Walsall, the first known reference to Bilston was back in 985 AD in the grant charters of St Peter's Collegiate church in neighbouring Wolverhampton. It is later mentioned in the Domesday Book as a village called Billestune, a largely rural area until the Industrial Revolution when it was extensively developed for factories and coal mining.  From the middle of the 18th Century, Bilston became renowned for the craft of enamelling, items produced included decorative containers such as patch-boxes, scent boxes, and bonbonnieres. Bilsetnatun can be interpreted as meaning the settlement (ton) of the folk (saetan) of the ridge (bill).

Fidelitate et Industria Stat Bilstonia (Bilston endures by Faith & Industry). The Bilston coat of arms consists of a woman holding a lamp on the left and the ancient Roman god Vulcan with his hammer on the right.

One of the first places you'll encounter on the high street is the Greyhound and Punchbowl which made the headlines last month after being extensively damaged by fire. I took the photo above when I visited with my friend Claire last October (here's her account of our trip).

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Believed to have been built in 1450 as a manor house The house was sold during the English Civil War to John Green, whose son died during the Battle of Worcester and it is believed that either Charles I or Charles II visited. The manor house was owned by the Green family until 1715 until it was abandoned in around 1774. It was licenced as a public house named Ye Olde Greyhound in 1793. It eventually fell into disrepair again, until it was restored in 1936 by Messrs. W. Butler & Co. Limited and was renamed The Greyhound and Punchbowl. On 20 June 1952 Historic England designated The Greyhound and Punchbowl as a Grade II listed building. It was last refurbished in 2003 and it has since been placed on the Heritage at Risk Register. Who knows what the future holds.

Whatever your beliefs, you can't help but admire the elegant Regency-era St Leonard's Church, built in 1825 and situated on the high street. With a board outside advertising bottomless cups of coffee and tea for 50p we couldn't resist popping inside for some refreshment. Not surprisingly the cafe was doing brisk business. The coffee was really good and the atmosphere friendly and inviting and despite being a raging atheist I wasn't struck down by a bolt of lightning either - always a bonus. 

There's been a church here since the reign of Ethelred in AD997. During the reign of Henry VI, a chapel known as St Leonard's Chantry was recorded with Thomas Hecock named as parish priest in 1475. During Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries, commissioners came to Bilston in 1546 and recommended that the church be closed and the lands seized although the building was never demolished.

We wandered along the very idyllic sounding Mount Pleasant with the intention of visiting the small but perfectly formed Bilston Craft Gallery but echoing last week's trip to Shugborough, it turned out that Monday is the one day of the week when it's not open. Oh well! 

The Robin, the Black Country's premier live music venue. China Crisis (remember them?) played last Thursday.

The police station is reported to be the only police station in the UK with a moat. It proved useful during WWI when the building was besieged by an angry mob. They were demanding the release of some soldiers who had been arrested for disorderly behaviour whilst on leave from the trenches in France. 

The now derelict Bilston School of Art was built in 1897 on Mount Pleasant, Bilston to commemorate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. It was designed by town engineer, Captain Wilson, who reputedly based the design very closely on an institution in Glasgow.

A young woman dashed across the road to tell Liz and I how lovely we looked and how we were bringing beauty to Bilston. I think she was expecting us to say we were from somewhere cool when she asked where we'd travelled from and, as always, we got a look of abject pity when we told her we were from Walsall! 

The building has been boarded up since I visited with Claire last year, apparently the local ne'er-do-wells had been up to no good and lighting fires after getting off their tits on all matter of dodgy substances. You do wonder how much longer this once-beautiful building will last.

Now residential apartments, the Art Deco Beldray building was formerly a factory producing domestic metalware - the company, still British owned - was founded in 1872 and invented the first adjustable ironing board.

The quirky looking building below was the former Office of Wolverhampton District Electric Tramways Ltd.. built in 1902. The depot was converted for the use of trolley buses between 1928-30 and closed in 1965. To the left you can see the Kandha, the symbol of the Sikh faith, as there's a gurdwara next door. 

I love a ghost sign! 

Here's Women’s Work, by Rose Garrard, 1997. Standing four metres high this bronze sculpture of a female beside a pit-head gantry commemorates the impoverished women working in the 19th-century coal and iron industries of the Black Country. Women's Work is situated close to the site of a former ‘fold’, a cluster of small hovels where families lived and the women of which forged tiny items such as nails, chain links and pulleys, selling them to merchants in order to survive.  

These items have been fused into the clothing of the statue, her head is a small anvil and her forearms are the tongs used for holding the hot metal.  Her feet are flat irons, whilst the back of her skirt is composed of stacked cooking pots as local women were later employed in nearby factories making cast iron cooking pots and flat irons as well as in large laundries where they put the irons to use.  The figure is stooped over to support her burden of coal, the constant position of a ‘pit-bank wench’ paid to work bowed down all day to reclaim any usable lumps of coal from the slag heaps at the pit head.

 Bilston's branch of 'Spoons is named after Drakes Drum poet, Sir Henry Newbolt, who was born in Bilston but moved to Walsall and lived in the street adjacent to ours (I blogged about his Blue Plaque HERE).The Henry Newbolt made the national headlines in 2018 when someone brought their horse into the pub. Which, if you've ever spent time in the Black Country, you probably wouldn't be at all surprised by.

If you're not a Wetherspoons regular you might not be aware that each of the chain's 900 pubs has a different carpet reflecting the history of the building or the local area. Each bespoke carpet is worth around £30,000 handmade on an individual loom and crafted in Devon by Axminster Carpets. 

Bilston's carpet, often compared to that of long defunct motorway services fast food chain, Happy Eater, is in the top 5 of best Spoons carpets as voted for by carpet spotting regulars.

After salads and beers (and a non-alcoholic Becks for Lord Jon, the driver) we were ready to resume our shopping.

I love this timbered Arts and Crafts building. 

Jon snapped our yard brush in a leaf sweeping frenzy last weekend so couldn't resist purchasing this beast for £12 from Bright Bargains - one of those shops that sells absolutely everything you ever needed (and plenty of stuff you didn't think you did!)

This amazing two hundred year old Greco-Roman statue perches on the roof of Bright Bargains. I've never been able to find anything out about him but I'd love him for our garden!

After ransacking Bilston's charity shops - there used to be lots more but there's a mere four left now - we headed to Roger's......

Our friends Brendan & Lynn told us about this amazing food warehouse earlier this year and having depleted our stock of goodies from our first visit back in June, a revisit was well overdue.

As the sign says, it's biggest gone past date food warehouse in the UK and, like most sensible people, we're not in the least bit bothered about best before dates. You don't need to be a member and can shop here seven days a week - you just need plenty of space to store your purchases as most items are bought by the case...oh yes, and wrap up warm, it's freezing in there! 

We came back with cases of organic tinned cherry tomatoes, artisan chocolate, fancy tea, fava bean chips, vegan salad dressing, chilli-flavoured pretzels, sunflower seeds, unsalted nuts, pickled beetroot and red cabbage, chilli sauce, organic couscous and what has to be the bargain of the year - industrial sized cans of Greek stuffed vine leaves for a quid! Total spend: £32

Find Rogers HERE

Back at Liz and Al's we enjoyed mugs of tea and some very tasty Lidl Liebchen biscuits and were treated to a gorgeous rainbow. That's the view from their living room window - aren't they lucky?

What did we find in the few remaining charity shops of Bilstonia? Liz got a few Xmas pressies, a vintage turban and a fabulous 1970s hand knitted tank top (found lurking on the kids' rails). I snaffled this amazing hemp midi skirt by ethical (and rather pricey) clothing company, Thought printed with portraits of Emily Bronte and quotes and scenes from Wuthering Heights. Having never read Wuthering Heights and as the skirt is a couple of sizes too big, it's destined for Ebay. 

There's also a 1980s Indian-made embroidered hooded blouse, a 1990s fringed velvet applique blouse (also made in India), a Perry Ellis, American engineered denim jacket, a ceramic cat mug (mine!), a cold war era wool tank top - made in the GDR and the holy grail of British mid-century fashion labels, a Horrockses printed cotton top.

Although I'm a good 35 years older than the target demographic (like I care!), at £2 I soon snaffled these Urban Outfitters Missoni-esque bellbottoms and wore them to walk down to the swimming baths this morning. I bought the slouchy handknit hat from a charity shop on the way home (50p) as I was fed up with my fedora blowing off. 

Combined with a high necked black blouse by B.Young (new with the £69.99 tags still attached) purchased for £3 from Shelter in the Spring, a £1 suede belt (via the Acorns Hospice) and my £3 cowboy boots (Cancer UK) today's outfit cost a whopping £9.50. I'm such a cheap date.

Thanks for reading, see you soon!