Village, manor and parish
The name Kingswinford has covered more than one geographical scale. The nineteenth-century parish contained numerous villages and hamlets involved in coal, iron, glass, brick and pottery production. The village around St Mary’s was only one part of it. Treating every industry in the old parish as a town-centre activity would obscure how this landscape worked. [3]
The manor was royal property under Edward the Confessor and William I. Domesday recorded a mill, but no church; King John sold the manor to Ralph de Somery in 1206. St Mary’s preserves a much later patchwork of construction, with medieval tower fabric and a reset Romanesque carving. The church site links the surviving village with a long history of ownership and worship. [3]
Industry beneath the church
Mining affected the village’s most prominent institution directly. Historic England attributes the rebuilding of St Mary’s in the 1830s and 1840s to subsidence caused by mining; the restored church reopened in 1846. The surviving tower and rebuilt body record the costs of extracting the ground below a settled community, as well as the community’s investment in maintaining a place of worship. [4]
Coal moves by steam
In 1829 Foster, Rastrick & Co of Stourbridge built Agenoria for the Earl of Dudley’s Shutt End Colliery Railway at Kingswinford. The locomotive hauled coal wagons, linking the local mining economy with early steam engineering. It was a working mineral engine, whose significance lay in moving industrial goods rather than providing a passenger service. [5]
Agenoria was withdrawn by about 1864. After neglect and dismantling, E. B. Marten secured its owner William Orme Foster’s permission to reassemble it for an exhibition in 1884. Foster then presented it to the Science Museum. An engine built for local work became a preserved object through deliberate recovery, rather than uninterrupted public display. [5]
Broadfield: farming, care and glass
Broadfield House began as an eighteenth-century farmhouse with a threshing barn. Enlargement in the early nineteenth century turned its principal front towards the north-east. Once set in extensive grounds, it now stands amid later development. The retained barn makes the agricultural origin legible beside the more imposing residence. [2]
Staffordshire County Council bought the house in 1949 as a Mothercraft hostel; in 1969 it became an elderly people’s care home. It opened as a glass museum in 1980 and closed in 2015. Successive adaptations placed welfare and the collection of industrial art within a former private house. [2]
Making a new parish
A Catholic Mass centre began during the Second World War in a doctor’s surgery. St Mary’s vicar subsequently offered the Anglican hall for worship. A dual-purpose chapel and hall followed in Summerhill, with its foundation stone laid in 1950; Kingswinford became an independent Catholic parish in 1962. These shared and improvised spaces preceded a permanent modern church. [6]
The present Our Lady of Lourdes was begun in 1980 and opened in July 1983. The previous worship building became the parish hall. This was another local instance of an institution growing through reused premises and new construction, while retaining an older building for community use. [6]
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