Bearwood Town – A Black Country Poem about my home town

The interior of Lightwoods House in Lightwoods Park the Georgian home of soap magnate William Adkins may have resembled this interior of a period country house. Adkins had the house built in 1791 during the reign of ‘Mad King George’…..George III. It was during this turbulent time with the French Revolution taking place just two years earlier in 1789 that The Lunar Men Matthew Boulton the great Birmingham entrepreneur and manufacturer and the great Scottish engineer James Watt instigated Britain’s own ‘Revolution’: The Industrial Revolution which created our Modern World from the small provincial, manufacturing town of Birmingham in the English Midlands! It was Scot James Watt who had walked from Greenock near Glasgow to Birmingham to work with Matthew Boulton whose engineering ingenuity , inventiveness and innovation created the Industrial Revolution with his revolutionary steam engines that Boulton and Watt made at Smethwick’s Soho Foundry, which still stands in the grounds of industrial weighing machine manufacturer W.T.Avery Weightronix on the border between Birmingham and The Black Country near to The Black Patch Park the traditional home of Birmingham Gypsies where the famed Charlie Chaplin may have been born to a Gypsy”Queen” in the 1880’s as Chaplin’s Birth Certificate has never been discovered. The Foundry is in Soho on the former Handsworth Heath of Georgian Times near to the Modern-day Winson Green Prison. Watt improved the Newcomen steam engine, a working example of which can be found at The Black Country Living Museum in Dudley by adding a regulating condenser. The “Lunarticks” as they were known to ordinary Brummagem folk Boulton, Watt , Priestley, the first scientist to isolate Oxygen,Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Grandfather William Withering who discovered heart drug Digitalis and Josiah Wedgwood who created the Modern Ceramics Industry in the “Six Towns” of The Potteries near Stoke-on-Trent were meeting and “Making the Modern World” at Boulton’s home Soho House in modern-day Handsworth in Birmingham just 3 miles from Bearwood. William Adkins grand home Lightwoods House is currently undergoing regeneration and refurbishment after Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council won a £5.2 million Heritage Lottery Fund grant to reinstate Lightwoods House to its former Georgian splendour, another “string to Bearwood’s bow along with the wonderful Warley Woods just up Lightwoods Hill. There are so many good things going on in Bearwood “My Home Town” : Bearwood Town – A Black Country Poem about my home town

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