Pensnett

Pensnett is an area of the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley, West Midlands, England. It is situated three miles south-west of Dudley and two miles north of Brierley Hill. In 1966, Pensnett joined the County Borough of Dudley which became part of the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley in 1974.

Origins

Originally, Pensnett was a village in the countryside of south Staffordshire, in the parish of St Mark's, created during the 18th century. It was largely rural with just a handful of cottages and a tavern surrounded by farmland.

Towards the end of the 19th century the face of the area began a period of dramatic change. Several factories were built in Pensnett and the factory workers were mostly employed in the iron and steel industries. Many terraced houses with shop fronts were developed along the village's High Street around the turn of the 20th century, but the biggest changes were yet to come.

After World War I, Brierley Hill Urban District Council followed the example of almost every other local authority in Britain and built houses which were to be rented out to working class families. Several hundred council houses were built in the Pensnett area between 1920 and 1966, although a large percentage of the village's homes were privately owned.

Location

Pensnett lies in the Brierley Hill DY5 postal district. Due to its proximity to the Merry Hill Shopping Centre, which was built during the 1980s, the roads around Pensnett are nowadays extremely congested. As long ago as the early 1990s, there were plans to build a relief road around Pensnett, but they have yet to come to fruition.

Pensnett is home to the Pensnett Trading Estate, which was mostly developed during the 1980s as one of a series of government enterprise zones set up to bring employment to areas in economic decline due to deindustrialisation.

Education

The local secondary school is the Pensnett High School in Tiled House Lane which was previously known as Pensnett School of Technology and Pensnett Secondary Modern School. The school changed from Pensnett School of Technology to Pensnett High School in 2007. However, shortly after the school's update, it was announced that the school will be closed in 2010 and all the children will be sent to two new academies in the Dudley area.

The local authority's Learning Support centre was situated on Birds Meadow from 1978 until 1989, within the buildings of the former Birds Meadow Infant School which dated back to the 1930s. The site was redeveloped for private housing in the early 1990s.