s Amblecote History Society has developed it has become obvious that not only do our member’s interests lie in ‘historical history’ but also in natural history; and that Amblecote, as place where until recently open fields were relatively common, has important flora and fauna survivals.

Equally, with land prices so high and developers squeezing ever more residential units into even smaller and smaller spaces, the pressure on what little open land remains is becoming extreme.

Here in Amblecote over the past thirty years we have seen large areas of open fields, along with accompanying hedgerows and woodland, turned (in many cases via open cast mining) into urban sprawl, leaving us with a few precious threads and islands of greenery. Furthermore, because of the ex-industrial (or soon to be so) nature of many sites in our area, developers can use the disingenuous argument that they are ‘reclaiming’ brown-field land and not removing ancient open space. Disingenuous because, as both we and they know, the nature of our part of the Black Country was to see farmland and industry co-exist and that many ex-industrial sites would happily return to nature if they were just left to do so, whilst there are some precious areas in Amblecote that have never been developed at all.

The people of the countryside ‘proper’ are quite rightly militant when it comes to protecting their environment from urban encroachment. However, with ‘our fields’ already built on it is vital that we in Amblecote adopt an equally vigorous stance in protecting what open space and greenery remains.

The Society's Conservation Officer, Helen Cook, is responsible for focusing our efforts in nature conservation.