Galton Village

Last updated November 13, 2019

Galton Village is a residential area of Smethwick, West Midlands, England. It takes its name from the iconic nearby Galton Bridge that was named after local business man Samuel Galton whose land the new BCN Main Line (lower level) canal was built through, the canal runs behind Galton Village as does the Stour Valley section of West Coast Mainline. The Oldbury Road runs through the area which begins next to Smethwick’s Galton Bridge railway station and ends at Spon Lane, next to a small shopping centre.

Smethwick is an industrial town in Sandwell, West Midlands, historically in Staffordshire. It is 4 miles west of Birmingham city centre and borders West Bromwich and Oldbury to the north and west. Formerly a Staffordshire county borough, Smethwick is situated near the edge of Sandwell metropolitan borough and borders the Birmingham districts of Handsworth, Winson Green, Harborne, Edgbaston and Quinton to the south and east, as well as the Black Country towns of West Bromwich and Oldbury, West Midlands in the north and west.

The West Midlands is a metropolitan county and combined authority area in western-central England with a 2014 estimated population of 2,808,356, making it the second most populous county in England after Greater London. It came into existence as a metropolitan county in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972, formed from parts of Staffordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire. The county itself is a NUTS 2 region within the wider NUTS 1 region of the same name. The county consists of seven metropolitan boroughs: the City of Birmingham, the City of Coventry and the City of Wolverhampton, as well as the boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull and Walsall.

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to the west and Scotland to the north. The Irish Sea lies west of England and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south. The country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain, which lies in the North Atlantic, and includes over 100 smaller islands, such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight.

The original housing estate on the site of Galton Village, built by the new County Borough of Warley council in the late 1960s, was known as the West Smethwick Estate. This estate consisted of maisonettes and flats which were made from concrete, and earned it the nickname "Concrete Jungle". By the 1980s, many of the flats were empty or in disrepair, and the estate was blighted by unemployment and crime. At the beginning of the 1990s, Sandwell MBC decided to demolish the estate.

Warley was a short-lived county borough and civil parish in the geographical county of Worcestershire, England, forming part of the West Midlands conurbation. It was formed in 1966 by the combination of the existing county borough of Smethwick with the municipal boroughs of Oldbury and Rowley Regis, by recommendation of the Local Government Commission for England. It was abolished just 8 years later in 1974 under the Local Government Act 1972, with its area passing to the Metropolitan Borough of Sandwell.

Between 1992 and 1997, the estate was completely redeveloped. The swathe of concrete buildings had been cleared to make way for modern and attractive low-rise housing. The West Smethwick Estate title was abandoned in favour of Galton Village.

Just to the south of Galton Village is West Smethwick and its park; the area sits on the border with West Bromwich to the north and Oldbury to the west. As stated above, the Oldbury Road runs through its heart; this is a collective main thoroughfare the A457 from Birmingham.

It is not to be confused with the Galton council estate in neighbouring Oldbury, which was developed during the 1920s and 1930s.^[1]

Oldbury is an industrialized market town and administrative centre in Sandwell, West Midlands, England. It is a part of the Black Country, and the administrative centre of the borough of Sandwell.

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Coordinates: 52°31′59″N2°02′24″W / 52.533°N 2.040°W / 52.533; -2.040

Geographic coordinate system Coordinate system

A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are often chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position and two or three of the numbers represent a horizontal position; alternatively, a geographic position may be expressed in a combined three-dimensional Cartesian vector. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation. To specify a location on a plane requires a map projection.

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