History Summary

The site is situated 2 miles west of the centre of Walsall in the West Midlands. Historically this was part of the Offlow Hundred in the county of Staffordshire. The site is towards the western limit of the old parish of Walsall and is in what for several hundred years was park land belonging to the Manor of Walsall – Willmore writes in his 1887 history of Walsall that ‘in the time of Henry VIII the park abounded with deer and timber and within memory the remains of many old oaks have been found within its precincts’.

The site of a moat and the manor house sits half a mile to the east of the site and a few hundred yards to the west is the Sneyd Brook, long time limit of the parish. To the north is the Wolverhampton Road and to the south Park Farm and Pleck. These constants help us fix the new building’s position. The manor passed down through many owners from Edward the Confessor through such notables as Herbert Ruffus, the Marquis of Dorset, Henry VII, Queen Mary and the Earl of Bradford.

By 1763 the land is owned by Right Honourable the Countess Dowager of Mountrath. It is still marked as ‘Park Lands’ hereabouts but the land has been divided and the site is occupied by a 4 acre field being farmed by a Joseph Marlow and is called ‘Park Piece’. Joseph seems to have lived in a small farm on the site of the subsequent James Bridge Colliery and farmed 84 acres of the Manor land.

By 1840 and the time of the Tithe Map the land is still part of the Manor (now under the ownership of Sir Orlando Bridgeman, 2nd Baron of Bradford and 1st Earl of Bradford). ‘Park Piece’ is now called ‘Alumwell Close’ and is farmed by a Simeon Foster. Fields nearby are called ‘Well Piece’, ‘Upper Hovel Close’, ‘Lower Ho[?}t Holes’ and ‘Peat Bank Piece’. The farmhouse for this collection of fields now seems to have moved to a small dwelling on the Wolverhampton Road.

According to the Victoria County History the manor descended with the earldom (of Bradford) until 1945 when the greater part of the estate was sold. By this time housing was spreading west reaching Primley Avenue by the late 1940s. In the early 1950s infant and junior schools were built just to the north of the site and in 1971 the secondary school arrived on site.

Between the 1880s and 1940s map evidence shows the site as a handful of fields surrounded by industry to the north, south and west and a growing Walsall to the east. Earthworks and tracks on Ordnance Survey maps suggest that the site was linked with the Bradford Colliery just over the canal to the west. To the south was the larger James Bridge Colliery which subsequently became home to various workings, refineries and manufactories.