Walsall Local History Centre

Walsall Local History Centre holds all archives for the Borough of Walsall.

Authority	Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council
Location	Lichfield Street, Walsall, WS1 1TR. See map
Website	[1]
Membership/ID	CARN
Photocopy policy	£1 per A4 sheet
Camera policy	£8 per half day

What is held here

Items for the Walsall area.

How to use it

The archives moved to the main library in the centre of Walsall in 2019. Unfortunately the staff are really finicky regarding copyright. Another visitor to the archives wanted to make copies from a book but was told she could only copy 5% of it. The plans I wanted to copy are under 50 years ago and are based on OS mapping and was told only A4 sized copies of each sheet could be made. Therefore I could only copy half of each A3 sheet. Thank god the plans were already reduced in size by 50% from their original 1/2500 scale. So instead of paying £8 to take as many photos as I wanted it ended up costing £43 for an incomplete set of plans. I then had to spend a good deal of time making sketches of the missing sections on the reverse of each copy.

Items found here

• Lots of stuff for the pre-M6 Toll era Birmingham Northern Relief Road but alas, the detailed plans for each individual section can't be found despite the best efforts of the staff.

EDIT - thankfully some of the 1/2500 plans have turned up following the move to the new location. The items of interest are:

1239/3/2/9 - this shows the red route at 1/2500 scale between M6 J4a and Bassetts Pole on an alignment to the west of Water Orton and using the full length of the A38 Sutton Coldfield Bypass.

1239/3/2/11 - this shows the orange route at 1/2500 scale between Bassetts Pole and M6 J11 on an alignment running through Aldridge, Pelsall and joining the M6 south of J11. M6 J10a is identical to that shown on early 70's proposals for the "Brownhills Extension" and the route between here with the spur to the A5 at Rising Sun Island could well have been resurrected from these proposals.

1239/3/2/12 - these are 1/2500 plans of a short section the route as built but showing the public sector scheme junction layouts.

1239/3/2/20 - these are 1/2500 plans of a short section the route as built but showing the public sector scheme junction layouts.

Due to the arcane copyright practice as this archive I didn't record which sections the last two documents covered. One was from M54 J2 to Cannock and the other was from Bassetts Pole to Wishaw along with a section around Brownhills.