In the days when the floors of two-room pubs were glossy with freshly hawked Dudley oysters and the markets sold blewits and pies, the Black Country really was black with soot, with the issue of belching chimneys.
Furnaces, foundries and forges abounded and many of the area’s buildings acquired a patina of smuts. As industry declined in the 1960s and ’70s, many of its factories were demolished while others, constructed of impervious materials, were cleaned to the point where they looked brand-new. Those faced in terracotta resemble the late Peter Bull; they take on an appearance of glaring ferocity far from the mournful mien of widow’s weeds.
My revenant grandfather (b. Oldbury, 1880) would recognise very little of what actually remains – though around the sinister Walloon city of Charleroi – destitution and pneumoconiosis are international. So is sprawl.
