Darlaston, United Kingdom

Rapid industrial growth in the early decades of the 19th century brought with it problems of housing, poverty, and deprivation. In December 1839, the parish rector reported approximately 1,500 homes in the parish of Darlaston, most of which were in poor condition and owned by working-class people. In 1841, the town had a population of 6,000. Development was driven by the presence of excellent transport links: the Birmingham Canal Navigations and Grand Junction Railway. Much of the mining land was owned by the Birmingham Coal Company. Artist Thomas F. Worrall was born in the Woods Bank area in 1872, where his father worked as a blacksmith.

Notable beneficiaries of nineteenth-century industrialisation were the Rose family whose fortune had been made by astute enclosure of common land. Upon the death of Richard Rose in 1870 his estate was valued at over £877. He bequeathed the land to his wife Hannah. His brother was James Rose, shown in the 1871 census as a latch, bolt, and nut maker, employing 39 people, including 19 children. By the time of the 1881 census, James Rose was 55 and his business had expanded to employ 90 people. James Rose died in 1901.

In 1894, Darlaston became an urban district, and the local board became Darlaston Urban District Council. On 1 April 1966, the district was abolished and merged with the County Borough of Walsall and the County Borough of Wolverhampton. The parish was also abolished on 1 April 1966 and merged with Walsall and Wolverhampton. In 1961, the parish had a population of 21,839. In 1974, it became part of the metropolitan county of the West Midlands.

Darlaston was subject to several bombing raids in World War II. A Luftwaffe bombing on 5 June 1941 wrecked several council houses in Lowe Avenue, Rough Hay, and killed 11 people. The bomb had been aimed at Rubery Owen's factory but missed by some distance. The houses were later rebuilt.

Many Victorian terraced houses were demolished during the second half of the 20th century, and the Urban District Council of Darlaston built thousands of houses and flats to replace them with. Since 1999, the council-owned housing stock has been controlled by Darlaston Housing Trust. In 2001, two of the town's four multi-story blocks of flats were demolished, and the remaining two were demolished in 2004.

By the end of the 1980s, most of the industry in the town had closed and the town is now considered a ghost town, with an increasingly high level of unemployment. In 2011 a total of 15 derelict sites in the town were designated as enterprise zones offering tax breaks and relaxed planning laws to any businesses interested in setting up bases in the selected areas. These enterprise zones are expected to create thousands of jobs and ease the town's long-running unemployment crisis, which has deepened since 2008 as a result of the recession.