Black Country Living Museum the museum's 1930s Street. On 15 June 2017 it was announced that the museum had been awarded £9.8 million from the National Lottery towards their £21.7m project BCLM: Forging Ahead, which will allow the museum to tell the story of the Black Country up to the closure of the Baggeridge Coal Mine in 1968. Plans include the translocation, recreation or replication at the Museum of Wolverhampton's Elephant & Castle pub, Dudley's Burgin’s Newsagents, a hairdressers, an NHS clinic, West Bromwich Gas Showroom and Dudley's Woodside Library, and a butchers all dating from the 1940s to the 1960s. The new plans
Black Country Baggins may have been based on Tolkien's observation of Mayor Ben Bilboe of Bilston in The Black Country, who was a Communist and Labour Party member from the Lunt in Bilston. But the scholarly evidence for this is still questionable. The Black Country is notable for its small breweries and brewpubs which, unlike most in Britain, continued brewing their own beer alongside larger breweries which opened in the Industrial Revolution. Small breweries and brewpubs in the Black Country include Bathams in Brierley Hill, Holdens in Woodsetton, Sarah Hughes in Sedgley and the Old Swan Inn (Ma Pardoe's) in Netherton. They