History
According to Dudley Council's planning and leisure department, Mushroom Green began with the settling of nail-makers in the 18th century on common land which was part of Pensnett Chase. Under the inclosure acts of the 18th century, the land was awarded to the Viscount of Dudley and Ward, to whom an annual cottage rent was then due, even by the earliest nailors who had been squatters.
The building material used was cheap and easily obtained locally: clay to build 'mud' houses (these have all gone), blast furnace slag (later rendered), and local brick. The siting of new dwellings was often based on kinship between neighbours. Small workshop buildings accompanied most of the dwellings and the occupants were poor and exploited by a series of middlemen who delivered the raw material and collected the end-product: nails. In many cases the women folk would have made the nails while their husbands and fathers went to other employment in the mines and furnaces such as at Saltwells or Cradley Forge.
Towards the end of the 18th century, many manufacturing processes were being mechanised nationally and by 1830 mechanised nail making had begun in Birmingham. By 1810 a chain making workshop appears in records of Mushroom Green and the nailors adapted their hearths to making chain, which was more communal and the workshops larger, but it used similar skills. By the end of the 19th century most properties in the settlement had a chainshop close to them. Several chainshops survived into the twentieth century but only one remains in anything like its original form having been restored by the local authority and the Black Country Society in the 1970s.
In 1852 a branch of the Pensnett railway opened to serve Saltwells Colliery, passing through Mushroom Green. A platelayer’s hut shows up on maps from 1884, adjacent to the Griff Chains chainshop established in 1865. Although demolished in the 1980s it was carefully rebuilt in an adapted form in 1992 and has a use as a garage and outbuilding.
Ron Moss, former chairman of the Industrial Archaeology Group of the Black Country Society supervised the opening of Mushroom Green Chainshop for 29 years on a monthly basis during the summer months arranging for Chainmakers Clarry Johnson and Mick Bradney to demonstrate their skill of making chain by hand. Many visitors attended these Sunday afternoon sessions as well as school children during the week as part of history lessons which Ron also liaised with local schools.
Ron was very involved in the restoration of the chainshop and the following is a summary of the book “Mushroom Green Chainshop” Ron wrote as part of the Black Country Society Studies in Industrial Archaeology series of books
In June 1972 the Black Country Society received a letter from the Planning Department of the then County Borough of Dudley with the information that “the future of the old chain shop and adjoining cottage in the Mushroom Green Conservation Area is now in double. Comments were requested on “the desirability of retaining these buildings to prevent their demolition.” Various meetings took place during 1972 concluding in November that the Black Country Society should be allowed to carry out the restoration albeit with a number of conditions.
Over the next 4 years after many meetings the chainshop and cottage were restored with BCS members providing a working party in the early days to remove rubbish and building contractors Arthur Webb and Sons Quarry Bank were chosen to do the restoration work which they did sympathetically with great care to keep the buildings as authentic as possible.
In May 1976 the chainshop was handed over to the Black Country Museum for fitting out with chainmaking tools and equipment to prepare it for re-opening which took place on 1st February 1977.
Ron remembered
After his passing on 4 April 2019 the Black Country Bugle published a tribute to Ron and on 16 October 2021 the Black Country Society unveiled a plaque at Mushroom Green Chainshop in recognition of Ron's vision and dedicated involvement saving Mushroom Green Chainshop.
The Industrial Revolution, sometimes divided into the First Industrial Revolution and Second Industrial Revolution, was a period of global transition of the human economy towards more widespread, efficient and stable manufacturing processes that succeeded the Agricultural Revolution. Beginning in Great Britain, the Industrial Revolution spread to continental Europe and the United States, from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going from hand production methods to machines; new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes; the increasing use of water power and steam power; the development of machine tools; and the rise of the mechanised factory system. Output greatly increased, and the result was an unprecedented rise in population and the rate of population growth. The textile industry was the first to use modern production methods, and textiles became the dominant industry in terms of employment, value of output, and capital invested.
The Black Country is an area of England's West Midlands. It is mainly urban, covering most of the Dudley and Sandwell metropolitan boroughs, with the Metropolitan Borough of Walsall and the City of Wolverhampton sometimes included. The towns of Dudley and Tipton are generally considered to be the centre.
The Black Country Living Museum is an open-air museum of rebuilt historic buildings in Dudley, West Midlands, England. It is located in the centre of the Black Country, 10 miles west of Birmingham. The museum occupies 10.5 hectares of former industrial land partly reclaimed from a former railway goods yard, disused lime kilns, canal arm and former coal pits.
The Metropolitan Borough of Dudley is a metropolitan borough of West Midlands, England. It was created in 1974 following the Local Government Act 1972, through a merger of the existing Dudley County Borough with the municipal boroughs of Stourbridge and Halesowen.
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Dudd (Dud) Dudley (1600–1684) was an English metallurgist, who fought on the Royalist side in the English Civil War as a soldier, military engineer, and supplier of munitions. He was one of the first Englishmen to smelt iron ore using coke.
Kingswinford is a town of the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley in the English West Midlands, situated 5 miles (8.0 km) west-southwest of central Dudley. In 2011 the area had a population of 25,191, down from 25,808 at the 2001 Census.
Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet is an industrial museum in the south of the City of Sheffield, England. The museum forms part of a former steel-working site on the River Sheaf, with a history going back to at least the 13th century. It consists of a number of dwellings and workshops that were formerly the Abbeydale Works—a scythe-making plant that was in operation until the 1930s—and is a remarkably complete example of a 19th-century works. The works are atypical in that much of the production process was completed on the same site. A more typical example of water-powered works in the area can be found at Shepherd Wheel.
Pensnett is a village of the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley, West Midlands County, England, 2 miles (3.2 km) south-west of Dudley. Pensnett has been a part of Dudley since 1966, when the Brierley Hill Urban District, of which it was a part, was absorbed into the County Borough of Dudley, later the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley from 1974.
Cradley Heath is a town in the Metropolitan Borough of Sandwell, West Midlands, England. It is in the Black Country, 8 miles (13 km) west of Birmingham. The town was known for the manufacture of chains in the first half of the twentieth century.
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The Dudley Canal is a canal passing through Dudley in the West Midlands of England. The canal is part of the English and Welsh network of connected navigable inland waterways and forms part of the popular Stourport Ring narrowboat cruising route.
The Round Oak Steelworks was a steel production plant in Brierley Hill, West Midlands, England. It was founded in 1857 by Lord Ward, who later became, in 1860, The 1st Earl of Dudley, as an outlet for pig iron made in the nearby blast furnaces. During the Industrial Revolution, the majority of iron-making in the world was carried out within 32 kilometres of Round Oak. For the first decades of operation, the works produced wrought iron. However, in the 1890s, steelmaking was introduced. At its peak, thousands of people were employed at the works. The steelworks was the first in the United Kingdom to be converted to natural gas, which was supplied from the North Sea. The works were nationalized in 1951, privatized in 1953 and nationalized again in 1967 although the private firm Tube Investments continued to part manage the operations at the site. The steelworks closed in December 1982.
Pensnett Chase was a wooded area of land owned by the Lords of Dudley Castle in the parishes of Kingswinford and Dudley. As a chase, it was originally used by them to hunt game in although it was also used as common land by local people. At some periods it was regarded as extending into Gornal and including Baggeridge Wood at one end and perhaps Cradley Heath at the other. By the 17th century the ancient woodlands had largely been cleared.
The Pensnett Canal, also called Lord Ward's Canal was a private 1.25 miles (2 km) long canal near Brierley Hill, West Midlands, England, which opened in 1840 and served the industrial enterprises of Lord Dudley's Estate. The engineer was Mathew Frost. Since its closure to navigation in 1950, much of it has been lost by overbuilding, but a small section at its junction with the Dudley Canal was restored in 1995, and the section through Brierley Hill remains in water, although it is polluted and not navigable.
John Bradley & Co was a company established in 1800 by John Bradley at Stourbridge in the West Midlands area of England. The company developed into a large industrial concern with furnaces, ironworks and mines. Under James Foster, John Bradley's half brother, it was instrumental in bringing the first commercial steam locomotive into the Midlands area in 1829. The firm stayed under family control until the early years of the 20th century when first the mining (1913) and then the ironworks (1919) were sold off. Part of the business continued to trade under the name John Bradley & Co. (Stourbridge) Ltd until after the Second World War.
The Earl of Dudley’s Railway or Pensnett Railway, was a 4 ft 8+1⁄2 instandard gauge railway that developed from a single 3-mile (4.8 km) line opened in 1829 to, at its maximum extent, a 40-mile (64 km) long network around the Earl of Dudley’s Iron Works at Round Oak near Brierley Hill.
Saltwells Local Nature Reserve is situated in the Netherton area of Dudley Metropolitan Borough in West Midlands, England. The reserve, created in 1981, covers 247 acres and includes Saltwells Wood and part of Netherton Hill within its boundaries. The reserve encloses two Sites of Special Scientific Interest and one scheduled ancient monument.
