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| This, dear surfer, is the River Stour, viewed from the bridge that gives the town its name. In all honesty, I can find little to say about it that might improve your perception of it. It does feed into the mighty Severn, the UK's longest river, by way of mitigation, but even though I have digitally enhanced the image from the murky darkness which shrouded it, the shopping trolleys can't quite be discerned. More encouraging is this view of the Bonded Warehouse, which lies at the end of a branch line of a canal. It may not quite be Stourbridge marina, but perhaps that would be a little too...vulgar? |
| I had thought that the famed Stourbridge glass industry was still going strong, but it seems that the "Glass Quarter" as it is fancifully signposted these days is really little more than marketing spin..there appears to be an enclave or two of genuine industry here and there, but they seem to be clinging to survival in a Srebrenican battle against takeover and globalisation. I hiked up to the famous glass-blowing cone (pictured on the left- click here for the websitej in Wordsley ( which may, or may not, be considered to be part of Stourbridge- it's rather like arguing if Pluto is really a planet), and found that the so-called factory shop seemed to contain nothing that wasn't made in Slovakia or Poland. When, after a microsecond or two, I had resisted an unfortunate, and rather expensive urge to shatter every piece of crystal on display with the cash register, I did think about asking if there was anything available which I could present to someone emlazoned with made in Stourbridge, but I thought better of this moment of madness m'lud, and walked home past another supposed factory shop where a rampant twee virus had taken a terminal hold on the merchandise. I wrote the paragraph above in my blog over Christmas; sadly, www.stourbridge-glass.org confirms that large-scale glass production has mostly ceased. Let's leave the European Union and introduce glass tarriffs! |
| Doubtless the canal system gives a clue to the fact that the West Midlands was a key area in the industrialisation of the country, but the product of which Stourbridge can be most proud is glass (and not,as some might think, the actor and adoptive Stourbrdgian who plays Mike Baldwin in Coronation Street). |
| Just to provide some contrast, here's part of Oldswinford, the town's oldest quarter: it offers some evidence that Stourbridge rests on the fault-line of rural north Worcestershire and the nascent midlands industrial revolution of centuries past. In this sense, perhaps the comment that Stourbridge is "a formless place in the midlands", attributed to the lead singer of Stourbridge indie bad Pop will eat itself is not entirely unfair, but taken out of context , it makes the town sound much worse than it really is. |
| Finally, for some light relief, here are some of the spectacular Christmas decorations fron Leonard Road, which puts the town on radar screens each December. I suppose the fact that the householders do raise a lot of money for charidee only just absolves them for their lack of taste. |
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