Black Patch Park
Black Patch Park is a park in Smethwick, West Midlands, England. It is bounded by Foundry Lane, Woodburn Road, Perrott Street and Kitchener Street, at.
The park, covering over, was part of a sparsely populated landscape of commons and woodland, dotted with farms and cottages which has been transformed from heath to farmland then to a carefully laid out municipal park surrounded by engineering companies employing thousands of people; Tangyes, Nettlefolds,, the Birmingham Railway Carriage and Wagon Company, Birmingham Aluminium Castings, ironworks, glassmaking and brewing. These factories, including the Soho Foundry, started by James Watt and Matthew Boulton are, but for foundations and frontages, almost all gone.
Much of what is known about Black Patch Chaplin Park appears in a book by Ted Rudge, developed from an Open University degree thesis, and published by Birmingham City Council in 2003. Rudge's research records how, from the mid-19th century until they were evicted from it at the start of the 20th, the 'Black Patch' was the camping ground of a community of tent and vardo dwellers who were to become integrated with 'gaujos' in surrounding districts. The Gypsies on the Black Patch lived on a deep barren layer of furnace waste, which, after their eviction, was cleared down to grass growing soil to create a park. There is disputed evidence that Charlie Chaplin might have been born at Black Patch.
Situation
Black Patch Park lies miles from Birmingham city centre just outside the boundary of the city, and is surrounded north, east and south by railway embankments. One of these carries the Birmingham - Wolverhampton part of West Coast Main Line.For centuries, Boundary Brook marked the boundary between Staffordshire and Warwickshire. In the centre of the park, Boundary Brook meets Hockley Brook, which once separated the country villages of Handsworth and Smethwick. Boundary Brook enters from the South, while Hockley Brook comes in from the West under Woodburn Road.
The park is linked to the Birmingham main line canal via a route through Avery Road that connects it to the West Midlands Sustrans Cycle Route 5, running along the canal towpath, part of a National Cycle Network running from the Cotswolds via Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwick, Birmingham, and Stafford to Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire.
Black Patch Park is edged by Foundry Lane to the west and south, Woodburn Road to the north, and to the east, Perrott Street, beyond which, as far as Handsworth New Road, stretches the triangle of Merry Hill Allotment Gardens. The West Midlands Metro has two stops nearby; Winson Green Outer Circle and Handsworth Booth Street. Kitchener Street which, until they were demolished in 1980, ran between terraced houses, was gated in January 2009 under section 129A of the Highways act 1980 - a measure intended by Sandwell MBC to prevent extensive fly-tipping.
Industrial Revolution
In 1769 James Brindley supervised the building of a canal between Birmingham and the Black Country. This waterway came to be known, within 60 years, as the 'old' Main Line Canal after Thomas Telford constructed a straighter, broader New Birmingham Main Line Canal, which opened in 1829 to carry an ever-increasing volume of narrow boat traffic. Brindley and Telford's waterways attracted industrial entrepreneurs including Matthew Boulton, and James Watt who bought by the canal at Merry Hill, about a mile from the firm's Soho Manufactory in Handsworth and opened the Soho Foundry in 1796 'for the purpose of casting everything relating to our steam engines'.As the local population grew, tension developed between them and the travellers. Rudge records that Gypsies and travellers camped on the "Black Patch" from the mid-19th century, not always with approval of local people. Only in the early 20th century, and after several attempts, were the Gypsies finally and forcibly evicted from the 'Black Patch' as rising population density and new land owning assumptions placed greater and greater restriction on their traditional sites.
From being a thriving industrial site, the area was transformed in little more than a lifetime, to a site of dereliction, with the decline of almost all the park's surrounding industrial giants during the economic upheaval of the 1960s. One successful survivor is Avery Weigh-Tronix on Foundry Lane, the world's largest manufacturers of machines for weighing, counting, measuring and testing, whose main entrance is the frontage of Boulton's and Watt's old Soho Foundry opposite the 'Soho Foundry Tavern'.
Gypsy connection
Rudge says that Esau Smith was the acknowledged king of the Black Patch. When he died in 1901 at the age of 92, his widow Henty was elected queen. Even while Esau was alive it was generally understood by local people that the Gypsies gained legal rights to the land as squatters. Though such rights are seldom written down, it is said that deeds to this effect were destroyed when the king and queen's caravan was ritually burned after her death on 7 January 1907. Queen Henty, who was buried with her husband in the churchyard of St. Mary's Church, Handsworth, is said to have placed a curse on anyone who builds over the Black Patch, the subject of a song by the well known folk artist Bryn Phillips in September 2003.In 1906 Mrs E J E Pilkington and Tangye Ltd were referred to as legal owners of Black Patch, having put it up for sale after employing land agents to carry out a court imposed eviction of the Gypsies on 26 July 1905. They did not finally relinquish links with the land until a "peaceful eviction" was negotiated by Birmingham Corporation Parks Department on 15 February 1909. Subsequent stories contribute to reasonable doubt as to who ought to have inherited the Black Patch and who now holds legal title to the Gypsies' old camping ground. Rudge reports that in 1960 Jane Badger, who lived near Black Patch, got into conversation while walking by the Park with a gentleman with an American accent. He claimed he owned the deeds to the land. This story resembles a statement made by Ray Plant, a distant relative of the Black Patch Gypsies, that a family called Murdock once owned the land and gave permission to camp there. According to Ray Plant when the Murdocks emigrated to America they handed over the Black Patch deeds to the Gypsies. The deeds were apparently stolen making any of the gypsies claims to the land unfounded. Many of the gypsy descendants still live in the surrounding area - the names of descendants accessible via the National Census.
In July 2005, a memorial plaque to the gypsies was erected. Sometime in March 2007 this plaque disappeared but has since been replaced.