Tipton Green

Tipton Green Village is the central area of Tipton, a town in the West Midlands of England. It was heavily developed for heavy industry and housing during the 19th century, as Tipton was one of the most significant towns during the Industrial Revolution. Tipton Green is one of three electoral wards covering Tipton for Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council. The population of this Sandwell ward taken at the 2011 census was 12,834. It is represented by three Labour councillors.

In June 1644, during the Civil War, Parliamentary forces attacked nearby Dudley Castle (a Royalist garrison), aided by Edward Dudley of Tipton Green Hall, which resulted in the Battle of Tipton Green. At this time, Tipton Green was still a very rural area.

With the increasing development of factories around Tipton Green in the 19th century, came hundreds of houses to provide homes for the workers. By 1843, Tipton Green had a population of approximately 8,000 people. However, virtually all of these houses had been demolished by the early 1970s to be replaced by a modern mix of private and council housing.

St Matthew's Church, the parish church of Tipton Green, was built in 1876. The church is still in use, although the original vicarage was replaced by a new building in its grounds in 1989 and the original vicarage is now a nursing home.

Tipton Baths opened at the junction of Queens Road and Manor Road in January 1933, as Tipton's first public swimming baths. These facilities were closed in the summer of 2002 due to funding difficulties with Sandwell Council, only to be re-opened within two years following extensive local campaigning and significant refurbishment to the building’s interior. The original swimming baths stayed open for nearly a decade afterwards, until being relocated to a new leisure centre in Alexandra Road in the spring of 2013, with the original building being demolished in the autumn of 2014.

Owen Street has been the main shopping area for Tipton Green since the 19th century, and includes the Fountain Inn, a 19th-century public house which in its early years was the headquarters of "Tipton Slasher" William Perry. By the early 1960s, however, Owen Street was falling into disrepair and Tipton Borough Council decided that redevelopment was necessary. Plans for a total redevelopment of Owen Street as well as the nearby Victorian residential area around Union Street and New Cross Street were unveiled, which would have included a pedestrianized shopping area with several blocks of multi-storey flats above some of the new shops. However, these plans were shelved when the town's council was abolished in 1966, and the area remained largely unchanged for more than a decade longer.

Sandwell MBC took control of the area in 1974, and a fresh plan for regeneration was soon unveiled. The southern side of Owen Street, along with most of Albion Street and the upper part of Union Street, were demolished in 1980 and replaced by new houses, flats, shops and a community centre. More demolition took part on the opposite side of Owen Street later in the 1980s, mostly to make way for the town's new job centre and the new Tipton & Coseley Building Society HQ which were built in the early 1990s. Further change came at the end of the decade when the community centre and early 1980s Midcounties Co-Operative supermarket were demolished within 20 years of being built to make way for new retail units and a library, which relocated from the Victoria Road building that had been in use since 1906.

Tipton Green was home to several key factories until the beginning of the 21st century. Bean Industries occupied a large site - which straddled the border with Coseley – in the area from the 1920s until the firm closed down in October 2005. The Hurst Lane section of the factory in Tipton had been closed and demolished by 2004, but the Coseley section of the site remained in use until the company's closure and was not cleared until the summer of 2008. A housing estate containing more than 200 houses and flats was built on the Tipton half of the site in 2005/06. This also incorporated some of the land previously occupied by 30 houses, an industrial unit and a butcher's shop on the corner of Sedgley Road West and Hurst Lane from about 1902 until demolition in 1994, following plans for road improvements which never materialised.