Model brings lost village back to life

Today it is not much to look at. All that remains is a sign – and a short, rubble dirt track.

But to the dwindling number of people who grew up in the tiny mining community on the outskirts of Dudley which was razed to the ground more than 60 years ago, Low Town is so much more.

"It was a real community," says Val Worwood, who was just two years old when the village was demolished in 1947. If people needed help, they didn't get it from social security, they helped each other."

The lost village is one of the several small communities in the Holly Hall area of Dudley which will be celebrated at a three-day exhibition.

Taking pride of place in the show at St Augustine's Church will be a scale model of Low Town, created by Arthur Edwards, who was 16 when the village, based off Pensnett Road, was knocked down.

Using maps and his own personal memories, the 76-year-old spent three months recreating the once thriving community, which once consisted of 70 houses, a pub and also two shops, in wood.

He says that when a reunion was held last year to mark the 60th anniversary of its demolition, more than 100 people turned out, many of them in their 90s, and it was following this that he decided to recreate the village in miniature form. "In those days, people didn't live together as families, they lived together with their friends – my brothers had their friends, my sister had hers. We played football in various parts of the field down the bottom."

The exhibition, at St Augustine's Church on July 4, 5 and 6, tells the story of the communities of Harts Hill, Low Town, Scotts Green and Woodside from the 1880s up until the late 1970s. Five booklets have been produced, featuring dozens of pictures dating back as far as the 19th Century.

One of Val's favourites shows a horse and cart picking people up for a pub breakfast, taken some time around 1900. And Val points out that some of the biggest movers and shakers to come out of the Black Country were born in the Holly Hall area: broadcaster Sue Lawley, legendary footballer Duncan Edwards, who was born in Malvern Crescent, Woodside, and Harts-Hill born property tycoons Don and Roy Richardson. Arthur Ashmore, whose wartime heroics led to him being awarded the George Cross, was from Low Town.

The exhibition reveals how the housing estate at Woodside was built by German prisoners of war, who were transported from a prison camp in Penkridge in lorries from the nearby Hudson's haulage yard.

The show opens at midday on July 4, with viewing at the church in Stourbridge Road until 4.30pm, and then in the evening between 6.30pm and 9.30pm, when there will be a talk about the history of Low Town.

The following day the exhibition will be open for viewing at 11am-6pm. And the site where Low Town once stood – which has now largely been absorbed into the Fens Pool nature reserve – will be open to visitors.

On the closing Sunday there will be a service of thanksgiving in the church.