Black Country Living Museum - Recent Developments - The Old Birmingham Road

The Old Birmingham Road

The Old Birmingham Road links St James’s School with the Cradley Heath Workers' Institute. Here buildings have been set in the 1930s to tell the story of the Black Country in the years leading up to the Second World War. Hobbs & Sons fish and chip shop and H. Morrall’s gentlemen's outfitters have been returned to their 1935 condition. The building housing these two shops comes from Hall Street, Dudley and dates to the late 18th century but was refaced with bright red pressed brickwork in 1889. The impressive tiled interior of Hobbs features hand painted tiled wall panels which have carefully restored. The frying range is of a design patented in 1932 and made by E.W. Proctor of Huddersfield, Yorkshire. In the 1930s many of Joseph Hobbs’s customers worked in nearby factories or shops. Today visitors can eat their fish and chips in the reconstructed saloon with its wooden benches or walk through the cart entrance to the modern Hobbs Courtyard Café situated in the back yard. Next door, visitors can buy souvenir 1930s style handkerchiefs, ties, scarves, gloves and hats in Harry Morrall’s menswear shop.

The next four buildings were rescued from Birmingham Street, Oldbury and date to about 1860. The block is dominated by the impressive green painted facia of Humphrey Brothers, builders’ merchants, who occupied these premises from 1921; it is a replica of the shop front as it was in about 1932. Humphreys sold fireplaces, toilets and a wide range of building supplies including ‘Walpamur’, a flat paint used for internal walls. The motorcycle shop is based on the business of A. Hartill & Sons which was located in Mount Pleasant, Bilston. The window contains a display of six motor bikes of Black Country manufacture dating from 1929-34. Next door is the tobacco shop of Alfred Preedy & Sons, a well known firm of wholesale and retail tobacconists, established in Dudley in 1868. James Gripton owned a radio shop in Birmingham Street from the 1920s and this reconstruction, set in 1939, contains ‘new’ and second radios for sale, some of which date to the 1920s.

The brick tunnel and cart entrance provide access to a late 1930s kitchen with an electric cooker made by Revo of Tipton. There is a radio workshop behind Griptons and then the stairs lead to two first floor living rooms and two bedrooms which are all set in the late 1930s and furnished with original 1930s style furniture and wall paper.

The Cradley Heath Workers’ Institute was built with surplus funds raised during the strike of Black Country women chain makers in 1910 for a minimum wage. The Arts and Crafts style building was designed by the Black Country architect, Albert Thomas Butler, and opened on 10 June 1912. The Institute became a centre for educational meetings, social gatherings and trade union activities in Cradley Heath. Re-erected at the Museum it stands as a monument to Mary Macarthur and her campaign to establish a national minimum wage in the ‘sweated trades’ where people worked long hours for poverty wages typically in appalling conditions. The building contains reconstructed offices, a news room with a digital interpretation of the background to the strike and a large hall which is used for a wide range of activities including theatre performances and concerts.