First Record
The first written record of Amblecote is as a Domesday village. Descibed as Elmlecote in William the Conqueror’s great survey of 1089, Amblecote was previously a manor in the ownership of the Saxon Earl, Algar.

Ancient Past
Map and historical evidence suggest that long before the Saxons, an Iron Age or Bronze Age earthwork once stood on the highest point of ground overlooking the Stour valley. Unfortunately any archaeological evidence, along with the remains of a later medieval manor house,were swept away during open-cast mining in the mid-twentieth century.

Farming and Geology
For most of its history Amblecote would have been a rural hamlet centred on its manorial hall, its open fields partially situated on the rich sandy soil of the valley and partly on the less productive clays of higher ground to the west. Unbeknownst to early farmers these underfoot changes signified a major underground geological fault, where the sandstones of the Severn valley abruptly meet the carboniferous clay and coal measures that collectively formed the south Staffordshire coal field.

Industry and Administration
In later years these minerals - coal, clay and sand - became vitally important to the economy of Amblecote, turning its wholly rural landscape into one where fields became peppered with quarries and mines, and isolated settlements were transformed into factory centres making bricks, glass and all manner of iron goods. As part of the ‘Black Country’, Amblecote contributed not only its natural resources, but a diverse array of manufactured goods ranging from some of the world’s first locomotives to its finest glassware. With development came administration and politics, and Amblecote evolved from a feudal manor into an independent Urban District within Staffordshire, before being subsumed into the so-called ‘Dudley’ Metropolitan Borough.

Modern Amblecote
In the years following the Second World war the industrial holocaust that had once consumed the English midlands became exhausted, and in its wake Amblecote was left with a legacy of industrial decline and increasingly redundant, if still agricultural, land. A vast strip mine finally removed the last of Amblecote’s coal reserves and utterly changed the topography of the higher ground, whilst in the valley the altered face of modern industry and the need to pander to ever more traffic has resulted in an ongoing programme of factory re-location and road development. This in turn has created a new, urban, Amblecote; the reclaimed land being utilised for housing estates and, more recently, apartment blocks. Modern Amblecote has rapidly become a suburb, albeit one with a long and vital past that it is vital to preserve.