Tag: housing

October 13th – Passing through Kings Hill, Darlaston today I noted activity on the site of the old Servis washing machine factory. This site – derelict for years, and once posited as the site of a new retail and leisure park by a prominent, diminutive Walsall Councillor – last year had a new housing estate approved for it. Like the Exidoor factory nearby, industry is being replaced in this area by houses.

I’m sure they’ll be nice, but it’s hard not to lament the loss of jobs and occupation.

Still, the drilling rigs are on site, and a surveyor has clearly been very thorough in marking out the subterranean hazards that lie beneath, judging by the spray-paint hieroglyphics all over the paths and road nearby.

January 26th – Passing through Kings Hill in Darlaston whilst nipping into Wednesbury, I noted that the former Servis factory site – nothing but a pile of rubble for a few years now – was subject of a planning application for 250 homes. 

Which is good, really, because we need them. But…

Servis was a big employer in Darlaston for many years, and was originally part of Wilkins & Mitchell, who made power presses and other machines. Servis stuff wasn’t great quality, and they didn’t modernise, despite pioneering electronically controlled washing machines. In the 1990s the company ran into trouble, and was bought by Italian white-goods giant Merloni, themselves crashing in 2008. Since then, the brand has re-emerged under a Turkish badge-engineering parent company.

The factory was razed, and lay pulverised as a testament to the economic rough seas Darlaston was enduring; as the factory was carried to dust, Councillors and regeneration wonks pronounced this site would very soon see a retail and leisure renaissance. 

There was soon to be an election, and one must suspect this was the usual electorate-buttering bullshit; the rebirth never came, and like the Exidor factory up the road, it’ll now become homes. 

Kings Hill – once the beating industrial heart between Darlaston and Wednesbury – is slowly becoming reclaimed by housing.

September 19th – Nice to see the housing project between Deakin Avenue and Watling Street coming along so well. A mixed development of flats and houses by Walsall Housing Group, it’s good that some social housing is being built here to replace at least a few of the huge number of dwellings that were lost in the slum clearance of the mid-2000s. 

These homes overlook the open heath at the top of Holland Park. Whoever gets the flats in the foreground will, in all probability, regularly get red deer visiting. Wouldn’t that be great? 

March 13th – There’s a lot of changes in progress at the moment in Walsall Wood, as I noted when I passed through tonight. The new Co-op store is finally ready to open on the 21st March at Streets Corner, and nearby, a new car sales showroom is being built on the site of the old library. Several applications had approval there, from a complex of flats to a convenience store. Nice to see something built after five years of dereliction.

Derelict for well over a decade, the abandoned terraces opposite Walsall Wood School are in the process of demolition, to enable the construction of a new housing development. It’s been a long time coming, and although it’s sad to see old buildings go, they were in a terrible state.

I hope the builders have the sensitivity to preserve the name-plaque and incorporate it into the new development, as was done with the Ivy House, nearby.

April 14th – Didn’t get far today for one reason or another. Slipping out for a quick scoot around town at teatime, I found myself at opposite ends of the modern development history of Brownhills. I noted that in High Street, at the corner of the Ogley Road junction, the second phase of the social housing project started a year ago has begun. Replacing the hated maisonettes that formerly occupied the site, it’s nice to see some housing development happening. We have so much land left vacant by the clearance of bad social housing, yet the pace of replacement is painfully slow. The 75-odd homes this project will create are next to nothing compared to the hundreds lost.
Meanwhile, littered with the detritus of drug use, forlorn and abandoned, the loading bay for what was Brownhills’ first Tesco at the rear of Ravens Court. Tesco have got cold feet on replacing this derelict structure with a new store, leaving the town in limbo. When will we ever learn?