County Borough of Dudley - History

History

See also: Evolution of Worcestershire county boundaries

Dudley had been a municipal borough since 1865. However, under the Local Government Act 1888, it became a county borough in 1889. It included the town of Dudley and the villages of Woodside and Netherton.

Due to the slum conditions of many houses across the borough, by 1915 the borough council had decided to start building new houses to let to tenants to ease the local housing problem. This began with the purchase of land at Kates Hill known as the Brewery Fields Estate in 1915, where the borough's first few council houses were completed soon afterwards. However, development was halted due to the ongoing Great War, but resumed afterwards and was completed in the early 1920s, centred around streets including Corporation Road, Bunns Lane and Highfield Road. By the end of the 1920s, more than 1,000 "Homes for Heroes" had been built by the borough council. These included further developments at Kates Hill as well as Netherton, Woodside and Bowling Green. However, thousands of families in the borough still lived in unfit housing, and in 1926 the boundary of Dudley and neighbouring Sedgley had been altered to include the land which would form the Priory Estate, where the first families were housed in 1930. By the outbreak of World War II, the borough council had built more than 3,000 homes in the space of 20 years, and 1,269 of these were on the Priory Estate. The nearby Wren's Nest Estate was also built around the same time. Other 1930s developments around Dudley included the Rosland Estate at Kates Hill and the Grace Mary Estate at Oakham.

After the end of World War II in 1945, mass council house building in Dudley continued for another quarter of a century. The largest developments of this era were the Sledmere Estate near Oakham in the mid 1950s and the Russells Hall Estate near Himley Road from the late 1950s to mid 1960s. The council also built eleven blocks of multi-storey flats in the borough between 1963 and 1969; three at Eve Hill, two at Grange Park, two at Queen's Cross and four at Netherton.

In 1966, under recommendations of the Local Government Commission for England, the county borough was expanded to include the vast majority of the area which had formed Brierley Hill Urban District, as well as the bulk of Sedgley and the southern section of Coseley, as well as a small section around Tipton, namely the newly developed Foxyards housing estate which straddled the border of Coseley and Tipton. This area also included the buildings on Sedgley Road West previously occupied by Tipton council.

As all of these areas were part of Staffordshire, Dudley was transferred from Worcestershire to the county of Staffordshire.