Oldbury, Langley & Warley Through Time

This book tells the story of Oldbury’s rise from overcrowded Victorian town to progressive municiple borough, and its absorption into larger local authorities from 1966. Its success was built on coalmining, metal working and chemicals. Further south, off the coalfield, lay the rural area of ‘old’ Warley, whose fields were lost to housing between the wars. Langley, at the boundary of the coalfield, was part industrial and part rural. Oldbury, Langley & Warley Through Time describes the area in 1900 and traces its changes during the twentieth century. It shows some of the people, organisations and events that made up life in this hardworking, hard-living area. Much recorded here has become a victim of ‘progress’ and we have only photographs, reports and a few eye-witnesses to preserve the history of the place and its old lifestyle.