The park, covering over 20 acres (81,000 m2), was part of a sparsely populated landscape of commons and woodland (known as The Black Patch), dotted with farms and cottages which has been transformed from heath to farmland then to a carefully laid out municipal park surrounded by engineering companies employing thousands of people;
Much of what is known about Black Patch Chaplin Park appears in a book by Ted Rudge, developed from an Open University degree thesis, and published by Birmingham City Council in 2003. Rudge's research records how, from the mid-19th century until they were evicted from it at the start of the 20th, the 'Black Patch' was the camping ground of a community of tent and vardo (caravan) dwellers who were to become integrated with 'gaujos' (non-Gypsies) in surrounding districts. The Gypsies on the Black Patch lived on a deep barren layer of furnace waste, which, after their eviction, was cleared down to grass growing soil to create a park.[2] There is disputed evidence that Charlie Chaplin might have been born at Black Patch.[3]
Situation
Black Patch Park lies 2+1⁄2 miles from Birmingham city centre just outside the boundary of the city, and is surrounded north, east and south by railway embankments. One of these carries the Birmingham - Wolverhampton part of West Coast Main Line. That and the A41 and the Birmingham Canal Navigations' Birmingham to Wolverhampton 'Mainline' canals - old and new - are arteries of the region's 'North West Corridor of Regeneration'.
In the centre of Black Patch Park, Boundary Brook, which for centuries marked a boundary between Staffordshire and Warwickshire, meets Hockley Brook, which once separated the country villages of Handsworth and Smethwick.[2] Boundary Brook enters from the South, while Hockley Brook comes in from the West under Woodburn Road.
The park is linked to the Birmingham main line canal via a route through Avery Road that connects it to the West Midlands Sustrans Cycle Route 5, running along the canal towpath, part of a National Cycle Network running from the Cotswolds via Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwick, Birmingham, and Stafford to Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire.
Black Patch Park is edged by Foundry Lane to the west and south, Woodburn Road to the north, and to the east, Perrott Street, beyond which, as far as Handsworth New Road, stretches the triangle of Merry Hill Allotment Gardens. The West Midlands Metro has two stops nearby; Winson Green Outer Circle and Handsworth Booth Street. Kitchener Street which, until they were demolished in 1980, ran between terraced houses, was gated in January 2009 under section 129A of the Highways act 1980 - a measure intended by Sandwell MBC to prevent extensive fly-tipping.
Industrial Revolution
In 1769
James Watt who bought 18 acres (73,000 m2) by the canal at Merry Hill, about a mile from the firm's Soho Manufactory in Handsworth and opened the Soho Foundry[4]
in 1796 'for the purpose of casting everything relating to our steam engines'.
As the local population grew, tension developed between them and the travellers. Rudge[2] records that Gypsies and travellers camped on the "Black Patch" from the mid-19th century, not always with approval of local people. Only in the early 20th century, and after several attempts, were the Gypsies finally and forcibly evicted from the 'Black Patch' as rising population density and new land owning assumptions placed greater and greater restriction on their traditional sites.
From being a thriving industrial site, the area was transformed in little more than a lifetime, to a site of dereliction[citation needed], with the decline of almost all the park's surrounding industrial giants during the economic upheaval of the 1960s. One successful survivor is Avery Weigh-Tronix on Foundry Lane, the world's largest manufacturers of machines for weighing, counting, measuring and testing, whose main entrance is the frontage of Boulton's and Watt's old Soho Foundry opposite the 'Soho Foundry Tavern'.