The motto above is the one adopted by the City I visited today; Wolverhampton, in the West Midlands. The City (a town until the year 2000, when it became one of the millenium cities, along with Brighton and Inverness) was founded around 985AD by Lady Wulfruna, a powerful Saxon noblewoman of Mercia. A statue of the Lady, proudly displaying the charter for the town granted to her by King Aethelred the Unready, stands just outside St Peter’s Collegiate Church in the centre of the City.
The steps up to the statue have an interesting inscription which, for the eagle-eyed, reads “I, Wulfrun, do grant to the proper patron and high-throned King of Kings, and in honour of the everlasting Virgin Mother of God, Mary, and of all the Saints, for the body of my husband and my soul; ten hides of land to that aforesaid monastery of the servants of God there”. This refers to the ten plots of land which she donated to local monks allowing a monastery to be established and the surrounding area to prosper. St Peter’s occupies the site on which the monastery once stood.
Even though you might not consider it to be a particularly interesting place, Wolverhampton has made history on several occasions. Princes St in the centre of the City is notable for being the first place in the world where traffic lights were installed. The Molineux stadium, home to the local football team, Wolverhampton Wanderers (one of the 12 founders of the football league in 1888 by the way) was also the first football ground to have floodlights in 1953. And, given that Wolverhampton’s early history centred around a powerful woman mourning for her husband, its probably also worth mentioning that it was the place where Queen Victoria made her first public appearance after the death of Prince Albert, when she unveiled a rather impressive statue of him on Queen Square. She was so pleased with it that she knighted the then mayor, John Morris, almost on the spot.
On the downside, it was also the parliamentary seat for many years of Enoch Powell who, while he was the local MP, made his notorious ‘Rivers of blood’ speech, in which he set out his controversial views on immigration and the disastrous effect he felt it would have on the country. Given that the City I visited today is probably the most comfortably multicultural place I know, I can say that although he was a very intelligent and courageous man (he was professor of Greek at Sydney University at the age of 25, and by the end of the second world war had risen to the rank of Brigadier) that’s one thing that he was completely wrong about.
As with many of our industrial towns and cities, Wolverhampton has had a very hard time in recent years, but there’s definitely light at the end of the tunnel (to paraphrase the City’s motto). As I found on my visit today, the Black Country Consortium and the University of Wolverhampton in particular are helping to rejuvenate the town as a centre for the knowledge economy and various creative industries. The presence of a decent coffee shop in the City centre (a ‘Costa Coffee’ in Queen Square, hidden behind Prince Albert here) is also a good sign, albeit a very minor one that, in this caffeine addict’s view, things are on the up. I wish it well…
I’ll be blogging about Wolvo more extensively, with lots more photos, when I visit again in July for LUGRadio 2008.