Mushroom Green
Mushroom Green is a hamlet in the Dudley Wood/Netherton area of Dudley, UK. It is known for its traditional chain making shop.
The Chain Shop is open to the public for free demonstrations of traditional chain making which is ethe only remaining chain shop in its original grounds in Europe. On the second Sunday of the month from April to October between 2pm and 5pm. The chainshop is run by volunteers and curated by local sculptor Luke Perry, director of the non-profit Black Country company the Industrial Heritage Stronghold (IHS).
History
According to Dudley Council's planning and leisure department, Mushroom Green began with the settling of nailmakers in the 18th century on common land which was part of Pensnett Chase. Under the Enclosure Acts of the 18th century, the land was awarded to the Viscount of Dudley and Ward, to whom an annual cottage rent was then due, even by the earliest nailors who had been squatters.
The building material used was cheap and easily obtained locally: clay to build ‘mud’ houses (these have all gone), blast furnace slag (later rendered), and local brick. The siting of new dwellings was often based on kinship between neighbours. Small workshop buildings accompanied most of the dwellings and the occupants were poor and exploited by a series of middlemen who delivered the raw material and collected the end-product: nails. In many cases the women folk would have made the nails while their husbands and fathers went to other employment in the mines and furnaces such as at Saltwells or Cradley Forge.
Towards the end of the 18th century, many manufacturing processes were being mechanised nationally and by 1830 mechanised nail making had begun in Birmingham. By 1810 a chain making workshop appears in records of Mushroom Green and the nailors adapted their hearths to making chain, which was more communal and the workshops larger, but it used similar skills. By the end of the 19th century most properties in the settlement had a chainshop close to them. Several chainshops survived into the twentieth century but only one remains in anything like its original form having been restored by the local authority and the Black Country Society in the 1970s.
In 1852 a branch of the Pensnett railway opened to serve Saltwells Colliery, passing through Mushroom Green. A platelayer’s hut shows up on maps from 1884, adjacent to the Griff Chains chainshop established in 1865. Although demolished in the 1980s it was carefully rebuilt in an adapted form in 1992 and has a use as a garage and outbuilding.
Further reading
- Moss, Ron (1977) Mushroom Green Chainshop. Tipton: Black Country Society ISBN 0-904015-13-0