Stourbridge drift (derive) Yule 2011

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Stourbridge drift (derive) Yule 2011, a set on Flickr.

A mooch round Stourbridge, where I lived in the 1970s, underlined its continued decline over the last thirty years. The thriving bits appeared to be the Job Centre+ and the Canal basin, opened by Direct Action. And yet this was a genteel well-healed town fuelled by 17th-century industrialism with the Earl of Dudley sponsoring research into smelting iron from coal and gentilhomme verriers making glass also "early adopters" of using coal in the 17th century. From that era comes a Friends Meeting House from the year that persecution of Quakers ceased. By the 18th-century the local pit and coal owners were flashing the cash.

Even in the 1st half of the twentieth century the town had swagger, with cinemas and an Art Deco club. But the second half of the century has seen bitter brutalist architecture and road-madness ring-road help drive the town into a less desirable location. A loss in confidence in placemaking until the Swine-ford began to decay. And yet urban forest emerges, and with it joy.