Walsall railway station doesn’t really exist. I was once mesmerised by the dark polished floor in the vast booking hall, and in awe of its wrought-iron canopy. Now whatever’s left has been swallowed inside a shopping centre named Saddlers as commemoration of a vanished industry. The usual shops –  Poundland, Claire’s Accessories, a Costa Coffee. Walking onto Park Street I come straight up against one of those sights so familiar from the past that it’s been long forgotten  – WH Smith’s, still where it’s always been, its ornate facade painted fireplace black; and on the building next door, murals of jolly friars from a pub called the Priory which is now a KFC. 

I grew up in Walsall, one of the most unloved towns in England, turning up inevitably on the lists of worst places to live. Cressida Connolly thinks it might even be “the ugliest town in the world”. Nowadays I make my home in the Walton ward of Liverpool, another one of those areas prefixed by the Anglo-Saxon word for stranger that gives Wales its English name; and another district that comes bottom of the statistics for life expectancy, disability, unemployment, and other yardsticks of urban deprivation. My patch, Orrell Park, is not so bad – an Edwardian development of mostly terraced houses, a place full of young families and commuters. Today I’ve come back to Walsall for the first time in years, researching places from my family’s past, and from my own.

My hotel’s ten minutes from the station, on Upper Rushall Street. Should be easy to find – Digbeth, then up some steps. Digbeth. I know the name, but not which it is, out of the several streets leading from the Bridge – which is not a bridge at all, but the centrifugal point in the middle of town – and there don’t seem to be any street signs. Someone tells me she’s lived here all her life but – you know what? – she couldn’t tell me the name of the road that we were on. A guy in a high-vis jacket, pushing a wire trolley stacked with cardboard, answers in an East European accent:  “Digbeth? That’s in Birmingham. This is Walsall. Walsall.” I try an office-worker type carrying a briefcase; cottoning on to my approach, he flinches, and doesn’t meet my eye, but I persist. Do I look so threatening, an older woman in a Zara jacket, leather holdall slung over one shoulder? 

Maybe he’s just in a hurry to get home, but I sense a deeper reluctance to engage with strangers, a defensiveness that strikes me throughout these two days, even though I’ll meet plenty of nice, friendly people, happy to chat and help me out. I’ve got used to Liverpool, where you can’t buy a paper without a chinwag, where everyone’s curious to hear you tell your tale.  Upper Rushall Street is, the man thinks, “somewhere up there”, and it is, of course, in an obvious place, by the foot of St Matthew’s, the massive hill-top church that has loomed over Walsall for hundreds of years. The High Street winding up the hill from Digbeth – the spot I was looking for, and where I’d been standing all along  – is the place that so impressed John Betjeman in the 1950s.  He valued the “charming and modest buildings, Georgian and Victorian” so highly he thought that with sympathetic development it might become “one of the most attractive streets in England.”  On market days, the stalls ran all the way down, the yodelling cries of the vendors battling one another at full volume.

Betjeman’s courteous suggestions were ignored – what did he know, toffee-nosed git? He didn’t have to live here in the smoke and the grime. The council pulled down the blackened old shopfronts that only he admired. I know all of this. We were glad to get rid of them in the 1960s. And there were clearly few regrets in the decade that followed; the art deco George Hotel, which gave the Bridge its grandeur, was pulled down as late as 1979. I know this too. But I’m not prepared for the cold blast of grief that hits me when I come face to face with my home town. The place I was desperate to leave when I was eighteen, the place I never looked back on, pretending I came from nowhere. 

The 1930s hotel was itself a replacement for the Georgian coaching inn, where well-to-do travellers paused for a break on the road to London. Hard to imagine anyone feeling nostalgic about the dreary offices that occupy the site in future years, when they too are dust. The first British statue celebrating a woman who wasn’t royalty stands close by. Sister Dora’s parents vetoed her plans to join Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, so she came to Walsall instead. The lovely statue, designed in 1886, embodies kindness and compassion, but she must have been tough – running a hospital single-handed, braving a smallpox epidemic, tending to the victims of a terrible explosion. This part of the West Midlands is called the Black Country for a reason. The Spectator observed in 1880 that,

“Any one who has travelled at night from Worcester to Wolverhampton will have seen the lurid flames of the great furnace-fires that light up sky and earth, and lend a wild beauty to what by day is ghastly and revolting. The high chimneys, belching out smoke, charge the air with poisonous effluvia. At night the fires, invisible by day, change the scene from low, grovelling squalor to the roar and glare of a volcanic hell. It is a land of recklessness and hopelessness, a land of drunkenness and sin.”

The Spectator went on to describe the foolhardiness of those who worked in such conditions, for whom the prospect of losing a limb was an everyday hazard. I recognise that fatalism, embedded in the culture that shaped me –  at best a wry cynicism, distrust towards the authorised versions of the truth; at worst a dampening down of hope and will to failure. But Dora challenged despair, winning respect, even veneration, before her own premature death. Now Dora’s statue has been shifted to the margins of the Bridge, pride of place reserved for Tom Lomax’s sculpture, “The Source of Ingenuity”.  Lomax specialises in civic abstractions; his gargantuan “Spirit of Enterprise” is the centrepiece of  Centenary Square in Birmingham.  Like “Spirit of Enterprise”, “The Source of Ingenuity” was designed to be a fountain, though the water was turned off almost immediately on health grounds. Two bronze heads are mounted back-to-back on gigantic shields.  Some kind of busy pattern dribbles part-way down their greenish rims, representing thoughts, it seems, or could it be the industrial past?

Lomax is also responsible for the Nombelisk, which has landed like a rocket on Bradford Street nearby.  Public art is supposed to  be good for you, boosting morale and helping revive local fortunes, even – like the New Art Gallery (still called the New Art Gallery, though it’s as old as the millennium) –  tempting outsiders into places they’d never usually visit. If I google “Public Art Walsall” I can find out what the symbols represent, and learn about the names written on the Nombelisk (though not which names they are). I can find out what those patterns symbolise, on “The Source of Ingenuity”. But stumbling across these objects, you just think, what’s that doing there? What’s the point of that pointy thing by the market? And why’s the market there, instead of up the hill, where it always was? Because the market blocked the site of a new Asda.

Markets are for the poor, the elderly, the disenfranchised, those who can’t drive to superstores or retail parks. Town is for people with nowhere else to go, for the addicts, drunks, homeless, unfortunates, who can be found basking like seals on the concrete steps ranged around the “The Source of Ingenuity”.  After checking into my hotel, I wander down Bridge Street, past the neglected mock-Tudor facades, past the Gothic script announcing the offices of the defunct Walsall Observer – reaching the carcass of what was once the teenagers’ pub, the Dirty Duck, the doors and windows blanked out entirely, the whole place painted the colour of parchment. There are a few businesses left – nail bars, betting shops, employment agencies –  the sheer number of these agencies, next to shuttered premises, an unconscious testimony to just how hard it is to find a decent job in Walsall. The neoclassical portico of St Mathews Hall, where my school held its carol services, looks more promising – sugary white, with a menu displayed at the gate, but when I get closer I can see a bunch of dodgy characters, raging between the tables outside, shouting at each other.

On to the Edwardian glory of the town hall and the library – still there, thank God, on Lichfield Street. I glimpse chandeliers and sparkling tiles at the entrance, guarded by uniformed staff at closing time. Further down the road, I catch sight of my old school, Queen Mary’s, but give up on the slow and complicated series of pedestrian crossings that will take me closer. It’s a dull evening at the back end of August, darkness falling ever faster, and I feel less safe in this lonely town than on the raucous streets of Liverpool. The air’s fragrant with spices; reluctantly I decide against exploring the curry restaurants, making my way to the Black Country Arms, near to the hotel, where I’m cheered by a plate of liver and onions and a pint of Fireside Bitter.

No one ever spoke about “the Black Country” much when I was growing up.  But with the spread of nostalgia and the interest in family history, the concept of a distinctive territory to the north of Birmingham has gained momentum. People aren’t ashamed of their accents, like they used to be; they’re more inclined to celebrate the local dialect now it’s disappearing.  The Black Country Arms is a re-appropriation of the Green Dragon, an eighteenth-century survival on the High Street that has endured both dereliction and a stint as a lap-dancing club. Now it seems to be thriving. A gleeful Finn at the bar, making a tour of CAMRA recommendations, tells me he’s off to the football. He’s clearly up for the whole Black Country Ale experience. 

I take a picture of an old poster, advertising She Stoops to Conquer at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Walsall, in 1819, followed by a “miscellaneous concert” of selections from Handel’s oratorios; and concluding by popular demand, with The Innkeeper’s Daughter. A long evening, and on a Wednesday – is the programme too good to be true? You can’t always tell the difference between the genuinely old and the retro. My hotel, the Lyndon House, is a hotchpotch of ancient and modern, a latch gate leading you downstairs from the pub and up again into the old Crabtree Works, where electrical switches were made. My room – shabby but comfortable, lined with blue-faded pictures in the mock-impressionist style –  used to be one of the offices. I didn’t know that when I booked, and now I’m excited at the thought that my mother’s first job was with this firm. She loved being at the offices at Crabtree’s, memorising the songs from the radio with the other girls, and she was making a good impression, she says, good enough to become a secretary – until her stepmother put a stop to it all.

That’s another part of the story. And none of it actually took place in this building, but at Crabtree’s other works, a little way across town. No one at the hotel can tell me much about its history, beyond what I can glean from a booklet left in reception by the Crabtree Society.  In the morning, I take a bus to the council estate where I grew up, and then another to the street where I was born in Palfrey.  “Them’s the roughest areas,” someone tells me at the hotel. But it’s fine. Things change. On the Beechdale, the front gardens are turned into parking spaces, the individuality tenants once expressed through flowers  transferred into chaotically-varied types of doors and windows. The entries here, and between the terraced Victorian houses in Palfrey, are sealed now, padlocked and gated,  sometimes permanently blocked. Crossing Palfrey Park, a place I don’t remember, where my mother must have pushed me in my pram, I meet other people catching up with the past; a Pakistani-born couple tell me how, when their grandkids were small, they loved to come and see the statue of the horse. And there it is, ribbed in steel, head bowed and docile, trotting forwards, representing nothing portentous, just the memory of the horses that gave a name, Palfrey, to this green stretch of land.

My great-great grandfather, John Robinson, came from rural Staffordshire to work as a stable lad in Walsall. They liked to hire country people at the Old Still Hotel, where business deals were struck, and travellers passed through, including it was said, Dr Johnson at one time. They had the space for 30 horses in those stables; this was a town full of horses, where finely stitched saddles and harness were made. I have the dimmest memory of a cutting from the Walsall Observer. Could it have been at Grandma Mountford’s house on Redhouse Street? She was herself a Victorian figure, a whiskery old lady in a dark dress, hair pinned in a bun at the back of her neck. “Old John” was her dad, the man who held the horses, remembered nostalgically in the 1960s. Thanks to the Internet, I can see a picture of John Robinson in 1920, a stocky figure with a white moustache. He looks like Thomas Hardy, standing proudly by his fine-boned and upright missus.  Looking into that severe face you’d never guess she’d given birth two years before they were married. It was like that in those days. You could make yourself respectable. People had large families; they recycled their parents’ names, and if a child died young they used the name again. Sometimes an extra child was fostered out, but mostly they managed. Sarah and John lived long and prospered, believing that their children would inherit a better future, tidy and well-regulated, free of coal dust and horse manure. John loved those horses, knew them better than anyone, but he had to accept they were on the way out. This was the twentieth century. Progress was racing faster than the human heart can beat, hurtling towards the ugly town.

---

Ailsa Cox was born in Walsall but spent her adult life in North West England. She’s widely-published as a short story writer, most recently in Confingo and The Mechanics’ Institute Review. Her collection, The Real Louise, is published by Headland. Some non-fiction related to this piece appeared in The Real Story.