Category Archives: the twentieth century

It’s a tall dome of a hairdo, it’s the name of a pub in Great Bridge, and it also happens to be a type of kiln used to make bricks.   This particular kind of oven (like the one pictured) was described in the 1970s as ‘characteristic’ of the Stour valley in the south of the Black Country (although they could certainly be found elsewhere).

Beehive kilns were used there to make ‘firebricks’, prepared from a local clay which made them very resistant to heat.  These were useful in a wide range of industries but especially the Stourbridge glass trade.  Our earlier post raised a comment about how firebrick-making fitted into the Black Country brick industry: this post is an attempt to start to give an answer.

Historic maps show at least 200 brick making sites have existed across a wide area of the Black Country (left).  On the other hand, the fireclay brick industry (right) appears to have been grouped in the south… the map shows a clustering of both fireclay mines and brickworks around the Stour.  So, on this evidence firebrick-making appears to have been a local specialism of a wider Black Country brick trade.

Our recent feature Changes on the Cut showed the disappearance of one beehive kiln in Brierley Hill (to the right of the photo here), flattened at some point in the last fifty years.  Many others have gone the same way since this photo was taken in the 1960s.  And, whereas the hair style will no doubt see occasional revivals (we love you Amy), the domes of brick kilns seem destined to remain marks of a lost landscape.

> The location of our disappeared kiln in Google Maps
> Both maps are from The Legacy of Factory Buildings in the Black Country.
> The painting of the beehive brick kiln is by Edwin Butler Bayliss and is held by Wolverhampton Art Gallery, details from Black Country History

Visitors sometimes say that the Black Country has its fair share of derelict land. But what we see today is, in historical terms, just a trifle.
To understand why the local landscape is the way it is in the 21st century, we have to appreciate that the struggle to regenerate the area has been an epic task, one which has challenged both local people and authorities in the region for more than a hundred years. It is also fair to say that it has been a struggle of national significance.  This map from 1964 for example shows both Lancashire and Staffordshire confronting dereliction on a very unusual scale, the case of Staffordshire not assisted by a hefty chunk of disused land in the Black Country.
You might ask if this is anything to be proud of.  Maybe not, but it helps to put recent regeneration projects, vitally important as they are, in some kind of perspective.  It also means that the regeneration which has taken place in the Black Country has been set against a challenge the scale of which has not been faced in most other places.
Read more about derelict land in the Black Country

Have you ever wondered where the photo on the home page of black country history was taken? It’s a great image, and we know it shows the Pleck Road, Walsall in 1934. But we can pinpoint where it was taken from? Luckily we have a couple of surviving landmarks in the distinctive tower of the offices of the workhouse, and the spire of St Matthew’s Church on the hill in the distance. A couple of other clues: the camera appears to be looking down from an embankment on to a fence in the foreground. Putting these together might put the photographer on the edge of the reservoir which used to be near the workhouse (see map). One of the interesting things about this image is that the cheek-by-jowl existence of farming and industry in the Black Country of the 1930s was already a relic – elsewhere the residential suburbs we know today had already started to cover the open land.  So, at the time this was taken what it showed was really already more representative of an earlier landscape phase. (Note that the original photo is held by Walsall Local History Centre).