Wombourne

Flint axehead, likely neolithic, found at Wombourne in 1943. Now in the collection of Wolverhampton Art Gallery.

The village has Anglo-Saxon origins, and was part of the large central kingdom of Mercia, which was settled by Angles. The whole region was wooded when the Germanic settlers arrived, and hamlet names like Bratch ("newly-cleared-land") and Blakeley ("dark clearing") attest to the need to clear land for settlement. The settlers reared large herds of pigs, which were easily fed in the beech, oak and birch woods, which are the naturally-predominant vegetation in the region. Local toponyms like Kingswinford ("royal pig crossing") and Swindon ("pig hill") confirm the importance of pig rearing in Anglo-Saxon times.

Wombourne is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086, and was clearly a medium-sized village by the standards of the time. Before the Norman Conquest, it was owned by an Anglo-Saxon nobleman called Thorsten. By the time of the Domesday survey, William Fitz Ansculf held seven hides of land, some of them let from him by one Ralph of Wombourne. William was an important landowner throughout the West Midlands, the son of Ansculf of Picquigny, a Picard baron who came to England with William the Conqueror and built a castle at Dudley. William's total holding at Wombourne supported 8 ploughs and was worth £3. There were 13 villagers (probably not including dependents, so perhaps thirty to forty people in total); a priest, and so perhaps some sort of church; as well as two mills, the first evidence for the importance of water power in the area. Wombourne was part of the Seisdon Hundred.

The Priors of Dudley built or rebuilt the Parish Church of St. Benedict Biscop around 1170, the only parish church dedicated to this Anglo-Saxon cleric. The building as it is seen today, however, is the result of numerous reconstructions and refurbishments, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries. The parish of Wombourne extended far from the village, taking in Orton and Swindon.

The former Heath House, a residence of the Foley family attached to their industrial complex at Heath Mill. Today it is an apartment block, known as Mansion Court.

For most of its history Wombourne was mainly an agricultural village. However, its involvement with industry began unusually early. From the Middle Ages, the Smestow Brook and the Stour were lined with small iron bloomeries and forges, using local reserves of charcoal and water. The Industrial Revolution brought coke-fired furnaces. In 1772, the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal was opened, with major canal locks at the Bratch and Bumble Hole, integrating the area more closely into industrial Britain. Iron production concentrated in a smaller number of centres – at Swindon, in the southern part of the Wombourn parish, at Gothersley, at the Hyde near Kinver, and increasingly in the nearby Black Country – using the canal to bring ore, coal and limestone to the works. Other villages, however, remained centres for smithing, with cheaper and more available iron greatly increasing the number of workers. Increasingly, Wombourne became a centre for nail-making. The Wom and the Smestow continued to provide both power and cooling water, with several large mills along each stream by the late 18th century.

Perhaps the largest water-driven forge was to the west of the village, where, an 1817 history remarks, "has been erected an iron-work called the Heath-forge, with genteel mansion".[4] This works had a large mill pool, supplied by the Merryhill Brook and by a contour canal from the River Smestow. Water fell thence in several stages to the Wom, which then joined the Smestow a short distance to the west. The forge mill was later converted into a corn mill, which functioned until the 1930s. The Heath Mill industrial estate on the main Bridgnorth road preserves the name of the complex. The mansion building, now converted into flats, is still to be seen in the Poolhouse estate, itself named after the poolhouse that stood at the dam. The water mill is clearly marked on the 1775 Yates map of Staffordshire, along with one at the Wodehouse, and another just south of the village centre, the remains of which are now the Pool Dam.

It was around the same time that the Hellier family reached the peak of their influence in the area. The Helliers lived at the Wodehouse, on the Wom Brook, to the east of the village. It was the fourth Samuel Hellier, knighted in 1762, who turned the Jacobean house into a centre of culture. He had the grounds laid out in fashionable style, with a hermitage, a temple to the memory of Handel, and a music room. He spent a fortune on musical instruments and books of music,[5] building up a private collection and endowing both the church at Wombourne and St. John's, Wolverhampton. The family collection included the Stradivarius named after them. Dying without issue in 1784, he left his property to a family friend, the Reverend Thomas Shaw, on condition he change his name to Hellier. One of his descendants spent years as commandant of the Royal Military School of Music at Kneller Hall. It is claimed that the Wodehouse has not been sold for over 900 years.[6]

In 1851, Wombourne was described by William White as a large village, "occupied chiefly by nailors, who work for the neighbouring manufacturers".[7] Nail-making remained important into the 20th century. As White implies, it was mainly the preserve of outworkers, who operated small-scale machinery in, or attached to, their own homes, fetching iron sheet or rod from the foundries and returning the finished product.

White tells us that the main landowners in the area in the mid-19th century were John Wrottesley, 2nd Baron Wrottesley, a notable astronomer, and Lord Ward – at this time the Reverend William Humble Ward, the tenth Baron, a relative of the Earl of Dudley. The Wards made their wealth not merely from land, but what lay under it: the coal and limestone of the West Midlands. Another important landowner, the Reverend William Dalton, was an Evangelical clergyman from Ulster, but he owed his wealth to marriage to the widow of a Bilston iron master.[8]

Although the parish had a population approaching 2000 by the mid-19th century, the village itself remained quite small – essentially confined to the area around the present village green. The hamlets of Giggetty, Blakeley, Ounsdale, and the Bratch were quite separate from the village and were only absorbed into it as suburban housing spread from the mid-20th century. This changed the whole character and structure of the village.

The area around the green, the original village of Wombourne, evolved as the commercial and cultural centre. The green was surrounded by small, independent shops, which remain a distinctive feature of the village's commercial life. A new civic centre, housing local council services, was constructed near Lower End, just south west of the centre. Suburban housing grew to form a wide ring around it, absorbing most of the hamlets.

In the 1950s, several hundred council houses were built around Wombourne by Wolverhampton council as part of an overspill rehousing programme for residents of the large town's slums.[9]

Large housing developments of the 1960s and 1970s around Giggetty and Brickbridge, to the west, were followed by a still larger westward extension in the Poolhouse estate of the 1980s, which absorbed the former Heath Mill. Meanwhile, light industry developed along the canal and the River Smestow, particularly beyond the main Bridgnorth Road, with industrial estates replacing former foundries. A new bypass was opened to the south of the village in July 1988, carrying Dudley, Bridgnorth and Telford traffic around Wombourne and Himley, and clearly separating much of the industrial area from the residential section. With Wombourne becoming an increasingly popular residential area, mass housing development continued into the new millennium, with building to the west of the canal between Ounsdale and the Bratch.

Wombourne has become well known for its "annual" carnival, held on the first Sunday of July. The carnival has a wide variety of stalls made up of independent traders, local businesses, community groups and local charities as well as much family entertainment. Including a funfair, bands, music groups, dance/drama groups, women's institute event and the Wombourne Village "Quacky" Races. The main parade starts at 12pm sharp, allowing residents and guests of Wombourne to line the parade route to cheer on the floats and follow them up to the main carnival site for the official opening at 1pm. The Parade will start at Wombourne Civic Centre, passing down Gravel Hill, Common Road, Giggetty Lane, Planks Lane, Church Road, High street and back to Wombourne Civic Centre. There will be temporary road closures during the parade so we ask for your patience during this time and hope people join in the festivities. The parade is made up of floats which are theme based, created by local schools.

Signpost for the Wom brook Walk at Wombourne, Staffordshire

The Wom Brook Walk is a Local Nature Reserve entirely within the boundaries of the village. It stretches for about 1.5 miles (2.6 km) along both sides of the Wom Brook, traversing the village from east to west. It contains a mix of meadow and woodland. It was established after some years of work by a local conservation group, the Friends of Wom Brook. There has been great excitement over the arrival of Wombourne's very first Little Egret in October/November 2010. It was seen hunting and roosting around the Wombrook on a number of occasions and Daniel Traynor captured the very first image of the bird which was later shown in the Parish News.[10]

The South Staffordshire Railway Walk is another Local Nature Reserve. It follows the course of the former Wombourne Branch Line, traversing Wombourne from north to south, before swinging east towards Himley and Dudley. It intersects with the Wom Brook Walk at the western end of Ham Meadow. To the north, it connects with the Wolverhampton Railway Walk, affording a pedestrian route into Wolverhampton via the Smestow Valley LNR. The former Wombourne station at the Bratch has car parking facilities, as well as a café and information.

The tow path of the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal also runs north–south through the western part of Wombourne, roughly parallel with the South Staffordshire Railway Walk and intersecting with the Wom Brook Walk at Giggetty. It forms part of a conservation area and can be followed as far as Kidderminster and Stourport on Severn to the south and Wolverhampton and Stafford to the north. It is said that once a year the phantom ghost train runs through Wombourne, with many of the local residents claiming they have both seen and heard it.

As well as the walks in or passing through Wombourne, there are also many country parks and places to walk in the surrounding area including: Baggeridge Country Park, Highgate Common, Himley Hall and Kinver Edge.