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In The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens portrayed The Black Country as a polluted hellscape where little Nell sickens and dies. So popular was the book that this idea of the region was riveted into history and endures to this day. In this edition of Free Thinking Matthew Sweet sets out to find the real Black Country, a place whose borders you can cross without knowing, with a reputation for insularity in spite of centuries of migration.
In a programme recorded at the Birmingham Hippodrome for the Â鶹Éç’s 2022 Contains Strong Language Festival, Matthew’s guests are the poet Liz Berry - author of the prize winning 2014 collection Black Country, whose latest collection The Dereliction is a collaboration with the photographer Tom Hicks; dialectologist Dr Esther Asprey, from the University of Wolverhampton, who published the first complete scholarly account of Black Country dialect; the artist and film-maker Dawinder Bansal, who uses her upbringing in her parents' electrical shop, which also rented VHS Bollywood films as the starting point for the art installation Jambo Cinema which was part of The Birmingham 2022 Festival https://www.dawinderbansal.com/projects; and a pair of historians, Dr Simon Briercliffe from the Black Country Living Museum, author of Forging Ahead – Austerity to Prosperity in the Black Country and Dr Matthew Stallard from the Centre for the Study of Legacies of British Slavery UCL who grew up in Wolverhampton.

Producer: Olive Clancy.

The 2023 Contains Strong Language Festival takes place in Leeds at the Leeds Playhouse from September 21st to 24th and will include a recording of Free Thinking on Sunday 24th looking at parenthood and childbirth. Tickets are available on the website and programmes will be available on Â鶹Éç Sounds.