Yesterday I followed up last weekend’s visit to the South Staffordshire district with a trip to Cheslyn Hay and Great Wyrley, which lie to the north of the district approx two miles outside Cannock. These settlements are former mining villages, whose residents now mainly travel to Cannock, Wolverhampton or Birmingham for work. As I walked around each village and spoke to local people and businesses, familiar themes came up in conversation.
The availability of local public transport was a frequent concern – on Sundays local residents can only rely on an hourly bus to Cannock or Wolverhampton and similar frustration was voiced with the rail service available at Landywood station. Care for the elderly was another worry – one lady expressing her anger with the Government for refusing her unemployment benefit, despite the fact she left her job to become a full-time carer for her mother (now deceased).
I ended my visit with trips to The Colliers Arms and The Talbot in Cheslyn Hay. Both pubs lie at either end of the local High St and have been around in one form or another since the late 19th/ early 20th centuries. At the Colliers Arms, I spoke with a single mother who missed the post-office that had closed in Cheslyn Hay two years ago, leaving the closest office a mile-and-half away in Great Wyrley. Another man expressed concern over the lack of facilities for young people, mentioning the overlap between under-age drinking and anti-social behaviour. He mentioned that his son was a member of two local golf clubs which offered excellent facilities for a combined average fee of £2 per day, and asked why more couldn’t be done locally.
Moving onto the Talbot, I introduced myself to a mixed group of regulars and explained my interest in their local area. One of the men was rather the worse for drink and challenged me over the issue of social care for the elderly. Before I had the chance to respond, he walked over and bundled me out of the door, exclaiming that if I couldn’t promise anything what was the point of talking! Undeterred I walked back in inside and spoke to one of his friends. He explained the man’s father was being forced to sell his house in order to pay for social care.
Somehow the group relaxed towards me and an animated discussion began. Anti-social behaviour and facilities for the young, pensions and care for the elderly, local transport, welfare dependency, lack of trust in politicians. The landlord who had moved up to South Staffs to get away from the stress of London, the lady who was concerned that politicians had forgotten how to listen. The young labourer forced to travel all over the country looking for construction work, the retired grandmother who had lived in the village for the past forty years and was worried for her grandchildren’s prospects. The man who had earlier manhandled me even offered to buy me a drink, continually expressing worry over his dad’s situation.
Eventually as the time came to leave, we shook hands and parted company. As I travelled back from Cannock back to Wolverhampton, I felt both saddened and angry. These people should have formed the primary focus for an incoming Labour Government and yet seemed to have been bypassed over the last decade. The scale of challenge for a would-be Conservative Government couldn’t be more stark, in the midst of the most severe recession this country has encountered – on the one hand we need to win back the trust of local communities in places like Cheslyn Hay and Great Wyrley, on other we need to show how we can help improve the quality of their lives.
Certainly enough to think about on the train back to London.
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