Introduction:The Beating Heart
By Dylan Potter
The Black Country is an intricate network of routes. There are the canal-ways that thread through the region and digress across the country. As well as the old routes that were used for transporting coal, steel and other precious resources. The railways, the first railways, weave a web across the landscape too, connecting the mines and the factories.
They link the mining towns and factory towns, to the ports and the major cities east, west, north, south. Looking at the transport maps, it feels as if you’re looking at the very hub of the nation. It’s not London, on the knee-bend of the isles, it’s here, in the Midlands.
Is this where Middle Earth comes from? Tolkien, a child of the Black Country, is evident everywhere. You don’t have to be an avid fan to see it. There are beautiful rolling hills, green woods and winding rivers where hobbits might live. There are little idylls of quaint Englishness among patches of blackness, where the land was mined and great monstrous machines heaved coal and ore out the earth. It is where orcs were born of the infernal darkness; the furnaces of the underworld.
The routes out of the Black Country lead to far-flung places. Not only were great world journeys enabled by the workers who built the boats and trains and engines here, but also workers from Ireland, the Caribbean, China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh came here to work from the mid-1800’s on; leaving their own imprint upon the rich culture here.
These are the people, the people of the Black Country, who literally built this nation. They made the nails, the girders, the rails, the anchors, the cogs, the keys, the carriages and the glass. They mined the fuel and the raw materials, which fashioned the infrastructure of this country.
So whether it’s the drama of the Titanic, the Gunpowder Plot or ghosts, the literature of Middle Earth or Middle English or the histories of migrants – and that infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech – welcome to the red-black, beating heart of Britain.