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 excluded by this definition because the coal here is too deep down and does not outcrop. The seam outcrop definition excludes areas in North Worcestershire and South Staffordshire. The first recorded use of the term "the Black Country" may be from a toast given by a Mr Simpson, town clerk to Lichfield, addressing a Reformer's meeting on 24 November 1841, published in the "Staffordshire Advertiser". He describes going into the "black country" of Staffordshire - Wolverhampton, Bilston and Tipton. In published literature, the first reference dates from 1846 and occurs in the novel "Colton Green: A Tale of the Black