Priory Estate

The Priory Estate is a housing estate in Dudley, West Midlands, England, which has largely been developed since 1929.

The Priory Estate is so named because it is located near the Priory ruins and Priory Park. It stands on land which once straddled the border of Dudley County Borough and Sedgley Urban District, which were in the counties of Worcestershire and Staffordshire respectively.

The borders were moved back several hundred yards in 1926 when Dudley Council purchased the land with a view to building council houses to rehouse more than 2,000 families from town centre slums. Hundreds of council houses had already been built across the Dudley Borough in the last decade, but the Priory Estate was to be the largest council housing development yet in the area as the town's slum problem was still far from being solved.

The boundary changes also meant that Dudley Castle was finally transferred to the borough of Dudley after centuries in Sedgley.

The foundation stone of the very first house, 9 Oak Road, was laid on 16 July 1929.

The first houses were occupied in 1930 and by the end of the decade more than 2,000 houses had been built on the Priory and Wren's Nest estates. There were also private houses for owner-occupiers built mostly on the south side of the estate near Priory Park, around the southern section of Priory Road, Hazel Road, Woodland Avenue, Chesnut Avenue, Somery Road, Forest Road, Paganel Drive and Gervase Drive. The Broadway, a new link road from Dudley town centre to Sedgley, was also laid out to include more than 200 private houses.

Three public houses served the estate: the Wren's Nest in Priory Road (built in the mid-1930s), the King Arthur on the corner of Birmingham New Road and Priory Road (built in 1939) and the Caves in Wrens Hill Road (built in the 1950s). However, the Wren's Nest (which was renamed the Duncan Edwards in 2001) was closed in late 2005 and was demolished a year later following a serious arson attack. The King Arthur closed in 2011 and has stood empty ever since. The Caves, the last public house on the Priory and Wren's Nest estates, closed in 2014, leaving the two estates without a public house for the first time in 80 years.

...
Wikipedia