County Borough of Dudley

The County Borough of Dudley was a local government district in the English Midlands from 1865 to 1974. Originally a municipal borough, it became a county borough in 1889, centred on the main town centre of Dudley, along with the suburbs of Netherton and Woodside. Although surrounded by Staffordshire, the borough was associated with Worcestershire for non-administrative purposes, forming an exclave of the county until 1966, when it was transferred to Staffordshire after an expansion of the borough boundaries. Following local government reorganization in 1974, Dudley took in the boroughs of Halesowen and Stourbridge to form the present-day Metropolitan Borough of Dudley, in the newly formed West Midlands county. Evolution of Worcestershire county boundaries Originally an ancient borough, Dudley had been a municipal borough since 1865. However, in 1889 it was granted county borough status under the Local Government Act 1888. Due to the slum conditions of many houses across the borough, by 1915 the borough council had decided to start building new houses to let to tenants to ease the local housing problem. This began with the purchase of land at Kates Hill known as the Brewery Fields Estate in 1915, where the borough's first council houses were completed by 1918, centred on streets including Corporation Road, Bunns Lane and Highfield Road, where more than 300 houses were built. However, the war effort meant that there were no more council housing developments in Dudley until after the end of the war in November 1918. By the end of the 1920s, more than 1,000 "Homes for Heroes" had been built by the borough council. These included further developments at Kates Hill as well as Netherton, Woodside and Bowling Green. However, thousands of families in the borough still lived in unfit housing, and in 1926 the boundary of Dudley and the neighbouring Sedgley district had been altered to include the land which would form the Priory Estate, where the first families were housed in 1930.