WHERE IS TIPTON?


Tipton is situated between Dudley and West Bromwich in the centre of the industrial Black Country within what is now officially the West Midlands, although the town is historically part of Staffordshire.

Tipton attained Borough status in 1938 but was absorbed into an enlarged West Bromwich County Borough in 1966 together with neighbouring Wednesbury. A further reorganisation of Local Government in 1974 resulted in the amalgamation of West Bromwich with Warley County Borough to form the Metropolitan Borough of Sandwell within a newly created West Midlands County Council.

The anonymous Sandwell was resented from its inception as it strove to mould its constituent communities into a corporate whole at the expense of local identity. In recent years however, it has achieved a degree of maturity in relaunching itself as a collection of Six Towns; Oldbury, Rowley Regis, Smethwick, Tipton, Wednesbury and West Bromwich, each with its own history and character.

These changes to the pattern of Local Government have blurred the old boundaries and made present day Tipton difficult to define. Even before 1966 Tipton as a postal address overlapped into neighbouring Council areas where Great Bridge, Princes End and Tividale straddled the Borough boundary. Then the 1966 reorganisation gave a slice of Tipton to Dudley County Borough whilst transferring a large swathe of Coseley Urban District into the new enlarged West Bromwich.

The advent of postcode boundaries in the 1970s created a Tipton DY4 district which encompassed most of the old Borough, the 1966 Coseley extension, plus the overlap of Great Bridge across the former West Bromwich boundary. The northern tip of the old Borough at Leabrook was however, sliced off into the Wednesbury WS10 district.

The redrawing of Council ward boundaries has added further confusion in recent years. Wards have been remodelled with scant regard to their community identity, the worst example being that the Tipton districts of Dudley Port and Burnt Tree now find themselves in Oldbury ward!


The Borough of Tipton in 1955 showing the canal system almost still at its full extent before the closures of the late 1950s and 60s.



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