Black Patch Park
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The area now known as the Black Patch was part of a sparsely populated landscape of commons and woodland dotted with farms and cottages which has been transformed from heath to farmland then to a carefully laid out municipal park surrounded by engineering companies employing thousands of people; Tangyes founded by Richard Tangye, Nettlefolds, (later GKN plc), the Birmingham Railway Carriage Wagon Company, Birmingham Aluminium Castings, ironworks, glassmaking and brewing. Research at the start of the new millennium, has recorded how, from the mid-19th century until they were evicted from it at the start of the 20th, the 'Black Patch' was the camping ground of a community of tent and 'vardo' (caravan) dwellers who were to become integrated with 'gaujos' (non-Gypsies) in surrounding districts.(Ted Rudge 2003, p.5). The great surrounding factories including the Soho Foundry started by James Watt and Matthew Boulton are, but for foundations and frontages, almost all gone
Black Patch Park and the Merry Hill Allotments lie 2½ miles from Birmingham city centre (in the UK) on the Sandwell Council side of the boundary with Birmingham City Council, surrounded north, east and south by railway embankments.
One of these carries the West Coast main line that with the A41 and the Birmingham to Wolverhampton 'Mainline' canals - old and new - are, in the early 21st century, arteries of the region's 'North West Corridor of Regeneration'.
In the centre of Black Patch Park, Boundary Brook, which for centuries marked a boundary between Staffordshire and Warwickshire, meets Hockley Brook, which once separated the country villages of Handsworth and Smethwick.
Black Patch Park is linked to the Birmingham main line canal via a route through Avery Road that connects it to the West Midlands Sustrans Cycle Route 5, running along the canal towpath, part of a National Cycle Network running from the Cotswolds via Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwick, Birmingham, and Stafford to Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire.
Black Patch Park is edged by Foundry Lane to the west and south, Woodburn Road to the north, and Perrott Street and Kitchener Street to the east beyond which, as far as Handsworth New Road, stretches well cultivated triangle of Merry Hill Allotment Gardens.
Lying amid intersections, boundaries and convenient transit stops, including the most recent Midland Metro, Black Patch Park’s 20 plus acres (8 hectares) have a special aura. Sometimes this place can be sunny and convivial, at others times, shaded, misty – especially at first light – and a little eerie; one moment a peaceful place full of birdsong and the sound of breeze in the trees, another moment full of human activity and passing trains.
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[edit] The Industrial Revolution
To understand these developments in more detail, we go back to 1769 when James Brindley supervised the building of a canal between Birmingham and the Black Country. This waterway came to be known, within 60 years, as the 'old' Main Line Canal after Thomas Telford constructed a straighter broader New Birmingham Main Line Canal which opened in 1829 to carry an ever increasing volume of narrow boat traffic. Brindley's and Telfords waterways were magnets for industrial entrepreneurs including Matthew Boulton, and James Watt who bought 18 acres by the canal at Merry Hill, about a mile from the firm's Soho Manufactory in Handsworth and opened the Soho Foundry[1] in 1796 'for the purpose of casting everything relating to our steam engines'.
As the population grew and settled around this proliferation of smokestack industries, tension grew between people whose employment fixed them near their workplace and those who needed a place to stay from time to time. Ted Rudge's 2003 publication "Brumroamin", records Gypsies and travellers camped on the "Black Patch" from the mid-19th century, not always with approval of local people. In all likelihood they'd been camping thereabout unheeded as they crossed the heath for far longer than this, but industrial building for housing and factories spread over all but the park and Merry Hill Allotments for which they had to make way. Only in the early 20th century and after several attempts were the Gypsies finally and forcibly evicted from the 'Black Patch' as rising population density and new land owning assumptions placed greater and greater restriction on their traditional sites. Today, plans for further building threaten even this small patch, which has already undergone further economic upheaval.
From being a thriving industrial site, the area was transformed in little more than a lifetime, to a site of dereliction, with the decline of almost all the park's surrounding industrial giants during the economic upheaval of the 1960s. One successful survivor is Avery Weigh-Tronix on Foundry Road, the world's largest manufacturers of machines for weighing, counting, measuring and testing, whose main entrance is the imposing frontage of Matthew Boulton's and James Watt's old Soho Foundry opposite the 'Soho Foundry Tavern'.
[edit] The Gypsy connection
Ted Rudge’s book, 'Brumroamin' (2003)[2], tells us that Esau Smith was the acknowledged king of the Black Patch. When he died in 1901 at the age of 92, his widow Henty was elected queen. Even while Esau was alive it was generally understood by local people that the Gypsies gained legal rights to the land as squatters. Though such rights are seldom written down, it is said that deeds to this effect were destroyed when the king and queen's caravan was ritually burned after her death on 7 January 1907. Queen Henty, who was buried with her husband in the churchyard of St. Mary's Church, Handsworth, is said to have placed a curse on anyone who builds over the Black Patch, the subject of a song by the well known folk artist Bryn Phillips in September 2003, which includes the lines:
- You better think before you touch her park
- You really don’t want to break her heart
- You’d better stop before you start
- To develop Black Patch Park
- The name of the Gypsy is Queen Henty
- A well respected Romany
- She still cherishes her memories
- As her ghost walks Black Patch Park
- I'd be careful if I were you
- I wouldn’t do what you’re thinking to do
- Queen Henty might put a curse on you
- If you develop Black Patch Park
In 1906 Mrs E J E Pilkington and Tangye Ltd were referred to as legal owners of Black Patch, having put it up for sale after employing land agents to carry out a court imposed eviction of the Gypsies on 26 July 1905. They did not finally relinquish links with the land until a “peaceful eviction” was negotiated by Birmingham Corporation Parks Department on 15 February 1909. Subsequent stories contribute to reasonable doubt as to who ought to have inherited the Black Patch and who now holds legal title to the Gypsies’ old camping ground. Ted Rudge reports that in 1960 Jane Badger, who lived near Black Patch, got into conversation while walking by the Park with a gentleman with an American accent. He claimed he owned the deeds to the land. This story resembles a statement made by Ray Plant, a distant relative of the Black Patch Gypsies, that a family called Murdock once owned the land and gave permission to camp there. According to Ray Plant when the Murdocks emigrated to America they handed over the Black Patch deeds to the Gypsies.
[edit] Creating the Park
Despite past and present doubts about exact ownership the impetus for and organisation of its purchase and development as a public park came from the Birmingham Playgrounds, Open Spaces and Playing Fields Society, chaired by John Nettlefold, a Birmingham Councillor, married into the Chamberlain family. A mix of public subscription and cash from Smethwick and Handsworth Councils and Birmingham Corporation raised £12,200. One of the vendors, Mrs Pilkington, donated £500 from the conveyance to assist with their aim of providing a place where people could enjoy fresh air away from the smoky atmosphere of the surrounding factories.
The new public space was divided into three; six acres in Handsworth, seven in Smethwick and seven in Birmingham. Further land was acquired to build Perrott Street, widen the Great Western Railway and provide the Merry Hill Allotments on the other side of Perrott Street. Birmingham Corporation was asked by the Society to lay out and manage Black Patch Park. Unemployed people under the supervision of a Parks' Superintendent carried out this work. It began in January 1909 and was completed in May 1910. The Lord Mayor of Birmingham, Alderman Bowater, formally opened the Black Patch Recreation Ground on 20 June 1911. In 1966 management was taken over by the new Borough of Warley, now Sandwell Metropolitan Council, whose Planning Department confirms that covenants held by Pilkington and Tangye still exist, but until then Black Patch Park was under the stewardship of Birmingham Parks Department. In August 2003 a campaigning group called "The Friends of Black Patch Park" [3] was formed in challenge proposals outlined in Sandwell Council's Unitary Development Plan to zone two thirds of the park for industrial use.
[edit] References
- Birmingham Central Library Archives
- David Papadopoulos (2002) Spatialities of Dereliction, [4]
- Ted Rudge (2003) Brumroamin: Birmingham and Midland Romany Gypsy and Traveller Culture. Birmingham City Council Department of Leisure & Community Services
- Ted Rudge's web pages on a campaign to save Black Patch Park (including the full text of Bryn Phillips song about the Park) [5]
- Ted Rudge's web pages on a Gypsy memorial plaque in the park [6]
- The website of the Smethwick Local History Society [7]
- [8] Position statement on 'Open Space' in Sandwell. Only an opinionated interpretation of this guarantee of the contribution of green space to economic and social well-being could use this document to justify building factories on Black Patch Park
[edit] External links
- [9] Sandwell Council's plans for Black Patch Park are described in The Smethwick Town Plan (PDF document) in the section on the 'Foundry Lane Action Area' in paras 8.6.1 to 8.6.20, pp.116-120 (map on page 120) and in Appendix 1, p.128
- Gypsy tribute to 'lost world' Jul 29 2005, Poppy Brady, Evening Mail
- [10] Revolutionary Players. History of the Industrial Revolution in the West Midlands
