XI
Perhaps the most striking way of picturing the great changes that have taken place in Wolverhampton in the course of a century is by comparing the different aspects presented by High Green at periods ranging from 1797 to modern times. It has had many changes. Only two features in the series of pictures have remained unaltered during that period: the handsome old brick houses at one corner have survived, and the noble tower of St. Peter’s still looks down upon the scene, as it has done for close upon five hundred years. The series opens with Rowlandson’s spirited drawing, showing the market in full swing. There are the butchers’ and other stalls; there you see a milkmaid, milk-pail on head, and the pack-horse of some country trader in the foreground. On the right hand is a picturesquely gabled, half-timbered shop, selling such incongruous things as toys and oysters: the building covered over with plaster and become an inn, long known as “Cholditch’s,” by the time the next view, taken in 1826, was drawn.
In that view, the coach, making so stately an exit in the direction of Birmingham and London, is the “Prince of Wales,” from Maran’s Hotel, Holyhead, to the “George and Blue Boar,” Holborn. It reached London from Birmingham by way of Henley-in-Arden, Stratford-on-Avon, Woodstock, and Oxford. The imposing-looking coachman with the three-caped coat was Miller, said to have been of Dunstall Hall, reduced in circumstances, and driving a coach as to the manner born. As for the monumental structure, like the second cousin to a lighthouse, standing in the middle of the road, that was erected in 1821 by the “Light Committee” of the town, to celebrate the establishment of the first gasworks and to illuminate the Market-place. As a monument it was successful enough, and the patent refracting gas-lamp that crowned it shed a light visible for miles around; but its height was so great that the Market-place itself remained in darkness. It only served to illuminate the bedroom windows of the surrounding houses and light the good folks to bed. The “Big Candlestick,” as the pit-men of the neighbourhood called it, was a failure, and, after several proposals had been made to crown the pillar with a statue of the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, or other heroes of that time, it was removed in 1842, to be succeeded some years later by that warlike trophy the captured Russian gun, seen in the picture of “High Green, 1860.” Railways had then long abolished coaches, and cabs waiting to be hired form a feature of the scene, eloquent alike of altered manners and of Wolverhampton’s growth. Some of the houses are also seen to have been rebuilt.
HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1860. From a Contemporary Photograph.
In the “Queen Square” of to-day the gun is replaced by an equestrian statue of the Prince Consort: a Gothic stone bank stands on the site of the old inn, and on the right hand stands a newer new building, with sundry other reconstructions and changes. High Green became “Queen Square” from November, 1866, when Queen Victoria unveiled the statue. History does not tell us why the Prince Consort should have been especially honoured at Wolverhampton, which owed him nothing, nor he it. Local association he had none, and in the placing of his effigy here we find only another example of the tiresome excess of loyalty that has planted statues of Royal personages thickly all over the kingdom, and has produced a dreary and unmeaning repetition of “Victoria” and “Albert” squares, streets, stations, museums, and what not, to the blotting out of really interesting local names that had endured for centuries before the wallowing snob came upon the scene, like some evil pantomime sprite.
Electric tramways now run through Queen Square to all parts of this modern and progressive borough, and new streets and new buildings of both a business and a public character have changed the squalid and formless character of the town into something very different; while pleasant suburbs extend far into the country districts.
XII
At Tettenhall the borough of Wolverhampton ends, and with it the Black Country. Crossing over the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, the road makes direct for Tettenhall Hill, eased in its course by a long embankment in the hollow, and by a deep cutting through the red rocks of the hill-top, but still a formidable rise. The old road, however, was infinitely worse. Its course may still be traced branching off to the left by the “Newbridge Inn,” where the old toll-house used to stand, and plunging down into the hollow where Wolverhampton’s only watercourse, the Smestow brook, trickles under a narrow bridge, thought to enshrine among its stones some remains of Roman masonry. Thence the old way rose steeply, and went partly through grounds now private, and up “Old Hill,” where a bye-road still zig-zags with an extravagant steepness between sheer rocks. Here is the chief part of old Tettenhall village, much the same as it was a hundred years ago, and, with the exception of an ugly modern hotel built on the summit of the rocks, untouched by the life and changes of all the revolutionary years that have passed since Telford cut the new road and left this in a quiet backwater of life.
Tettenhall church and pretty churchyard are cut off from the rest of the village by the modern Holyhead Road. Half-way up the hillside, and overhung with trees, the old-fashioned rural spot overlooks Wolverhampton, seated in smoky majesty on its ridge.