Town marks Queen’s coronation with book of pictures
Mayor of former Borough led official ceremony in square
OLBURY has long been part of Sandwell, but these pictures, of seventy years’ vintage, take us back to a time when Oldbury was a Borough in itself.
They are all from an official souvenir booklet which was produced to commemorate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in June 1953, but were taken the year before on her accession to the throne.
Above is Oldbury’s town square, hand-coloured, to show the neat beds of yellow flowers in front of the war memorial. The scene is spotless, and almost devoid of traffic.
On the left is the same location on a busier day; February 8, 1952, when the Mayor of Oldbury, Samuel Melsom, made his Proclamation of the Queen’s Accession.
Seemingly unconnected, shown below, is a photo of a very ordinary residential street. But this was the recently completed Richards Close housing scheme, council houses as we once called them, which the local authority were rightly proud of.
Like so many working class towns, Oldbury had had thousands of sub-standard, dated houses, which it had begun to replace in the years before and after the war. Almost 3,000 council houses had been built before 1939, and following the war and shortages of materials, another 600 had been put up, with Richards Close the most recent example.