Стаурбридж: История и современность английского города

Town in the West Midlands, England

Stourbridge ('/s//t//aʊə//b//r//ɪ//dʒ/) is a market town in the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley in the West Midlands, England, situated on the River Stour. Historically in Worcestershire, it was the centre of British glass making during the Industrial Revolution. The 2011 UK census recorded the town's population as 63,298.

Stourbridge is about 10 mile (16 km) west of Birmingham. It is part of the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley at the southwestern edge of the Black Country and West Midlands conurbation, Stourbridge includes the villages and suburbs of Amblecote, Lye, Norton, Oldswinford, Pedmore, Stambermill, Stourton, Wollaston, Wollescote and Wordsley. Much of Stourbridge consists of residential streets interspersed with green spaces. Mary Stevens Park, opened in 1931, has a lake, a bandstand, a cafe, and a mixture of open spaces and woodland. Bordered by green belt land, Stourbridge is close to countryside with the Clent Hills to the south and southwest Staffordshire and Kinver Edge to the west.

Stourbridge was listed in the 1255 Worcestershire assize roll as Sturbrug or Sturesbridge. The medieval township was named for a bridge which crossed the River Stour. It lay within the manor of Swynford or Suineford (now Oldswinford), which appears in William the Conqueror's Domesday Book of 1086. Pigot and Co.'s National Commercial Directory for 1828 9 describes Stourbridge as a "populous, wealthy, and flourishing market town" and gives its population in 1821 as 5,090. In 1966, the Stourbridge border between Worcestershire and Staffordshire, which for centuries had been marked by the River Stour, was moved a couple of miles north when Amblecote was incorporated into the Borough of Stourbridge. Following the Local Government Act 1972, Stourbridge was amalgamated into the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley and became part of the wider West Midlands county in 1974.

The town gives its name to local glass production, which has been manufactured since the early 1600s. The local clay proved particularly suitable for the industry, taken up predominantly after the immigration of French coal miners in the Huguenot diaspora. However, most of the glass industry was actually located in surrounding areas including Wordsley, Amblecote and Oldswinford. The rich natural resources of coal and fireclay for lining furnaces made it the perfect location for the industry. Glass making peaked in the 19th century, encouraged by the famous glass making family, the Jeavons. The vast majority of those involved in the glass trade came from Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Shropshire. 9% came from other parts of England and 0.2% had come from abroad. Of particular note are glass cutters, as 8.1% had come from Ireland, believed to be as a result of the decline of the Irish glasscutting industry in the first half of the 1800s. The houses inhabited by glassworkers were of a much better quality in comparison to the slums in which the nailmakers of Lye and Wollescote lived. However, only a few glassworkers owned their own houses. The Red House Cone, thought to be the only complete remaining glass cone of its kind, stands on the Stourbridge Canal at Wordsley. It is the site of the Red House Glass Museum and there are regular demonstrations of traditional glass blowing.

The town centre has seen major regeneration in recent years. In 2014, Lion Health medical centre opened in the renovated former foundry of Foster, Rastrick and Company – where the Stourbridge Lion locomotive was manufactured. The next phase of regeneration on the foundry site will create parkland next to Stourbridge Canal with a "heritage and community hub" named Riverside House. Crown Centre Shopping Mall at the bottom of Stourbridge High Street opened in 2013 at the site of the old Crown Centre and Bell Street multi storey car park, which were demolished between 2012 and 2013. Costing £50m, the new mall is home to a Tesco anchor store, a two level underground car park, six retail stores and a central food court. Stourbridge Bus Station underwent substantial redevelopment and re opened as Stourbridge Interchange in April 2012. In 2010, Stourbridge was awarded Fairtrade Town status. Stourbridge Farmers' and Craft Market takes place on the first and third Saturday of every month in the Clock Square. Throughout the summer, Mary Stevens Park hosts outdoor live music. In the 2011 Census, the average age of people in Stourbridge was 42. Conservative MP Margot James held the Stourbridge parliamentary constituency 2010–2019. She was succeeded in 2019 by Suzanne Webb of the same party.

Three main roads meet in Stourbridge, these being the A451, the A458 and the A491, the last forming the one way Stourbridge Ring Road. Stourbridge has two railway stations, the main one being Stourbridge Junction. From here, it is around 30 minutes to Birmingham, 30 minutes to Worcester and between two and 2.5 hours to London. The other station, Stourbridge Town, is served only by a shuttle to and from Stourbridge Junction. At just over , the Stourbridge Town Branch Line is believed to be the shortest railway branch line in Europe. The former main line to Wolverhampton via Dudley, and branches to Wombourne and Walsall closed in the 1960s. However the line towards Dudley remains open for freight as far as the Round Oak Steel Terminal north of Brierley Hill. In January 2021, proposals were made to reopen the line to Brierley Hill to passengers using a light rail vehicle similar to that used on the Stourbridge Branch Line. Stourbridge Interchange is the main bus station, located in the town centre next to Stourbridge Town railway station. The Interchange opened in 2012 at a cost of £7 million. Most services are operated by National Express West Midlands and Diamond Bus. By bike, National Route 54 of the National Cycle Network links Stourbridge with Dudley via the canal towpaths. The Stourbridge Canal links the town to the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal and the Dudley No. 1 Canal. This places Stourbridge on the Stourport Ring, navigable by narrowboat and popular with holidaymakers.

There is one college in Stourbridge. King Edward VI College was founded in 1552, becoming a sixth form college in 1976. Stourbridge College, south of the town centre, was formed in 1958 and specialised in art and design, but was closed in 2019. There is also a sixth form at Old Swinford Hospital school, which was founded in 1667 by the Stourbridge born politician Thomas Foley. The boarding school was named the best secondary school in Dudley, closely followed by Redhill School, an academy also in Stourbridge. Elmfield Rudolf Steiner School is an independent school which follows the international Steiner Waldorf Education curriculum.

The International Festival of Glass is held at Ruskin Mill in Stourbridge every two years. The British Glass Biennale is the festival's flagship exhibition, featuring contemporary work by glass makers in the UK.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, three Stourbridge indie bands – The Wonder Stuff, Pop Will Eat Itself and Ned's Atomic Dustbin – all had chart success, selling millions of albums between them and gracing the covers of NME and Melody Maker. Pop Will Eat Itself's former frontman Clint Mansell has since composed musical scores for films including Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream. The 80s metal bands Diamond Head, Witchfinder General and 80s pop band Kayran Dache also came from Stourbridge and Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant once attended King Edward VI College (then King Edward VI Grammar School for Boys).

Stourbridge is covered by these newspapers: the Stourbridge News (weekly), and the Stourbridge Chronicle (weekly). From the 1860s until the early 1980s, Stourbridge was covered by the County Express newspaper. The archives are now on microfilm in Stourbridge Library.

Stourbridge Football Club, founded in 1876 and nicknamed "The Glassboys", shares the War Memorial Athletic Ground in Amblecote with Stourbridge Cricket Club. Stourbridge Rugby Club play at Stourton Park in nearby Stourton. Dudley and Stourbridge Harriers have trained at the Dell Stadium since 1964. Other teams include Redhill Volleyball Club, which plays at Redhill School. Stourbridge Running Club also train at the War Memorial in Amblecote.

The fictional Middle earth world of Mordor in The Lord of the Rings trilogy is believed to have been inspired by the Black Country of the Victorian era. Author J. R. R. Tolkien grew up in the area. Scenes from the TV series Peaky Blinders have been shot at the Black Country Living Museum in nearby Dudley. In other literature, Stourbridge appears in Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, published in 1939 (part 1, episode 6, page 184). The town also gets a mention in The Cantos of Ezra Pound, a long, incomplete poem mostly written between 1915 and 1962 (Canto LXVI, line 30, page 380). Pound's epic poem is inspired by a diary entry from 1786 written by John Adams, the second President of the United States, which mentions Stourbridge. Stourbridge Golf Course is also mentioned by P. G. Wodehouse in Money for Nothing, published in 1928 (chapter 5).