Earth & places

A hamlet of 300 became a town of 13,000, then lost its reason to exist

Brownhills is a place that owes its entire existence to coal, and the arithmetic is stark: 300 people before the canals and railways arrived, more than 13,000 by the end of the century, almost all of them working the pits. When the mines closed in the 1950s, the town's economic logic vanished with them, and the decline described here has not stopped. A 2007 regeneration programme was meant to reverse it and produced little. It's a compact case study in what happens when an industry, rather than a geography, is the thing holding a town together.

Brownhills has no recorded existence before the 17th century, yet Ogley Hay, now just a district within it, was already listed in the Domesday Book.

Read the whole of Brownhills on Wikipedia

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