Rowley in Old Photographs

Rowley Regis is one of the oldest settlements in the Black Country, although little remains of its earliest origins today. The old village was perched on the slopes of the Rowley Hills, gathered around the Parish Church of St Giles, and remained virtually unchanged until the massive redevelopment of the late 1950s. The wealth of the village derived from the rock formations of the hills, with the basaltic quartz yielding an extremely hard material known as Rowley Rag, which was used for road-making. Quarrying, together with the expansion of coal mining in the nineteenth century, meant a hard life for the residents, and many families engaged in the cottage industries of nail-making and the production of Jew's Harps in order to survive. This volume contains in excess of 200 photographs and illustrations showing the life of the village and its surrounding hamlets. Many of them are published for the first time, having been obtained from individual family collections as well as established archives.