Second chance for the proud glass tradition
Dec 31 2010 By Steve Bradley
The 400-year-old glass industry in Stourbridge is slowly being given a new lease of life, as Steve Bradley reports.
In the great glass town of Stourbridge, something positive is stirring.
Its manufacturing dreams shattered by years of declining demand and withheld cash injections, this brow-beaten part of the Black Country is fighting back as it celebrates its magnificent gift to the world.
The dwindling 400-year-old glass industry, once the lifeblood of the town, is slowly being given a new lease of life as a combination of activists, businessmen and women, craftspeople and educationists strive, in slightly piecemeal fashion, to make it prosper.
And, yes, the politicians are coming on board. Somewhat belatedly, according to some commentators, but now they appear to be singing from the same hymn sheet, with words to the effect that Stourbridge, with its backdrop of magnificent factories rendered dark and dingy by years of hard-fought survival or dereliction, has a craft whose past, present and future is worth noting and encouraging.
The first tangible good news has come from the Glasshouse Development Project at the site in Wollaston Road in the Amblecote area of the town, owned and operated since 2000 by the Ruskin Mill Education Trust. Here, a college, focusing largely on glassmaking skills plus other arts, crafts and even agriculture (using Vale Head Farm in nearby Kinver), has been running in buildings deserted by Royal Doulton some 145 years after Thomas Webb and Sons, had first set up a glass works there.
The private college, for young people aged 16 to 25 with autistic spectrum disorders, had been looking to improve facilities in the largely dilapidated buildings and was knocked back to the tune of £8 million two years ago as the capital programme of key funder, the Learning and Skills Council, dramatically fell apart. But it has received a welcome double boost this year, opening the bright and airy Ruskin Glass Centre in August after collecting £1.54 million from doomed development agency Advantage West Midlands.
And in November, it was announced that the Heritage Lottery Fund was contributing a further £1.85 million to transform the imposing Lower Glasshouse, close to the main A491, into a multi-purpose arts, heritage, exhibition and education centre.
The building, already used for the International Festival of Glass in the summer as well as for student drama performances, is in dire need of refurbishment, as Glasshouse development project director Ian Clements acknowledges.
