Shropshire Magazine

The famed Dodger with its poignant message handwritten on the side.

Shirley Tart, associate editor of The Shropshire Magazine, tells the very personal story behind a fascinating collection of old photographs depicting a landscape of Telford that vanished to make way for today’s 21st-century new town

I call this Top Row – although it might actually have been Long Row – with Bottom Row standing at right angles. I had grandparents in each.

Looking at these pictures – black and white, ghosts of times long since gone, yet the golden years of childhood – I thought to myself: Gosh, that feels like a lifetime ago. The harsh reality? It was nearly a lifetime ago.

And the nostalgia is so much sharper because the cherished and (we thought) secure landscape around the tiny village where both sets of grandparents lived has long gone. The place where I was born, grew up, started at the Victorian red-brick Institute School (aged four) and was nurtured through safe and happy days, is now part of a bustling, modern town centre. 

Indeed when I work it out, I was born on what is now a supermarket car park!

Housing estates stand on the fields and pastures of my youth. The tree camps we built, the adventures we had, the stories we wove were magical but destined for burial. Because 40 years ago, it happened. Not just our little clutch of cottages and the old farmhouse at the centre of them went, but down the winding country lane in the two-row village itself (plus Tommy Payne’s Row just above) every homestead, allotment, each down-the-garden privy wash house, all the grandly customised sheds, were crushed beneath bulldozer and earth remover.

Progress

Crawford’s Farm opposite Dark Lane Chapel. Is that Mr Crawford outside? I think so!

At the time and in the name of progress, it felt that homes, lives and a solid and enduring community were also being crushed and broken. It was the end.

The little 19th-century village of Dark Lane which had sheltered so many generations (usually from the same families) was reduced to a replica of a massive and grotesque bomb site.

We had long since left by then, but the sacrifice of a village – not much more than a hamlet really – was acute and painful. And for those still living there, apart from having to move home, the worst part was knowing that the little Methodist chapel at the bottom of the village opposite Crawford’s Farm would have to go as well. It could hardly remain on what might become a new, late-20th-century highway after all, could it?

But in a community where everyone was Methodist – that’s what happens when there’s nowhere else handy to go – there was a real grief as the solid, square building with its neat pews, old peonies and a million memories also left the scene. The Dark Lane Dodger steamed regularly through the station and ferried us to faraway places (like Oakengates one way and Coalport the other) and then the station was silenced, never to host the Dodger or any other train again.

Our end of the village, with long-remembered horse-block, communal tap and the golden days of childhood lived out in a sleepy hamlet.

Dawley New Town, soon to be Telford and much bigger, was coming to relentlessly lay claim to our land of childhood and dreams, of bullrushes and gleaming gorse, of woodland and mountains which were really pit mounds, remnants of the steel industry and old brick workings – but for us, an adventure playground of wild bluebell glades and secret places.

Patch

Yet 40 years on, while a couple of generations from those days have taken their final leave, enough of my generation – wartime babies – are still around to have seen new lives built for thousands, and a veritable city landscape arise – having swallowed our old patch in one. 

And to be fair, many of the old village residents did make happy and successful new lives in surrounding towns. 

My maternal grandmother lived in a cottage which had only ever been inhabited by members of my mum’s family, while dad’s mother and sisters lived at right-angles, farther down the track – which was all the roads were really. 

Even as a tiny, I seemingly was prone to go missing and my mother would rush to the corner of our house to see me toddling over the hump-back bridge towards Dark Lane and one or another granny, or even their friends and neighbours. 

It’s staggering really, that there was little need to worry!

We pushed through bullrushes, swept pools for tadpoles, climbed trees – and in the case of some of us, clambered over the side of the bridge on to sleepers to better see the train go by. 

Of course, parents would have rightly been horrified at that last little trick; we made sure they never knew.

Now, this journey into the past is confined to memory and a few precious old pictures. 

Waiting for the train to arrive at what was officially Malinslee Station but claimed by us locally as our own Dark Lane stop-off, was always a great excitement, with little competitions as to who heard the Dodger first. 

That wooded, remote station of yesteryear would have been around the area of what is now the Hollinswood interchange in Telford town centre and a section of the old track remains as part of the Silkin Way walk around the town. 

Of course the train served other communities as well as ours; it was on the Coalport branch, off the Wellington-to-Stafford line and passed through Wombridge with its big private siding, and Oakengates before reaching our Malinslee station, all a landscape dotted with collieries, spoil tips and the Dark Lane foundry. Dawley and Stirchley were on the line, then Madeley Market station, and finally to riverside Coalport.

There was Tommy Payne’s shop, a vital phone box, the midwife and the post office run from Gladys Wilson’s parlour at number 36. Gladys’s daughter Melville and her husband Dennis were so concerned that the story of this buried village had not been fully recorded that they subsequently documented many memories and photographs in a booklet called Dark Lane, The Forgotten Village of Telford.

On that sad day when the remaining villagers finally moved out, the village born around 1830 – when blast furnaces were built and homes were needed for workers and colliers – was buried with little ceremony, I was privileged to have been invited to preside at one of the last Sunday School anniversary services in which I’d taken part every year throughout my childhood. 

In fact, basic though it all was, I also feel very privileged and enriched to have been part of this slice of social history, our home ground.

Ah yes! I remember, I remember the house where I was born. 

And the place now buried forever but which still holds on to a little bit of all our hearts.

One of the few colour panoramas of the old village, taken from Chapel Lane.