The Black Country is an area of the English West Midlands north and west of Birmingham and south and east of Wolverhampton. During the Industrial Revolution, it became one of the most industrialised parts of Britain with coal mines, coking, iron foundries and steel mills producing a high level of air pollution.
The Black Country as an expression dates from the 1840s and it is believed that it got its name because of black soot from heavy industries that covered the area.
The Black Country encompasses the three Metropolitan Boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell and Walsall and the southern parts of the city of Wolverhampton. A geological definition follows the South Staffordshire coal seam. The Black Country now lies within the West Midlands county but historically was divided between the counties of Staffordshire and Worcestershire. The Black Country does not include Birmingham.
Read more about Black Country: History, The Black Country Today, Black Country Dialect and Accent, Media
Famous quotes containing the words black country, black and/or country:
“The realization that he is white in a black country, and respected for it, is the turning point in the expatriate’s career. He can either forget it, or capitalize on it. Most choose the latter.”
—Paul Theroux (b. 1941)
“I know no East or West, North or South, when it comes to my class fighting the battle for justice. If it is my fortune to live to see the industrial chain broken from every workingman’s child in America, and if then there is one black child in Africa in bondage, there shall I go.”
—Mother Jones (1830–1930)
“It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.... There are some things in every country that you must be born to endure; and another hundred years of general satisfaction with Americans and America could not reconcile this expatriate to cranberry sauce, peanut butter, and drum majorettes.”
—Alistair Cooke (b. 1908)