Worcestershire

• 1. Introduction

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  Worcestershire is a county in the West Midlands of England with a name that has confounded outsiders for centuries and even made it into an animated film. The county's pronunciation, compressed to something like "Wuust-er-sher", so delighted the director Chris Miller that he set a DreamWorks animation there partly because, as he put it, "it is always being mispronounced." What lies beneath that famously garbled name is a landscape stretching across 1,741 square kilometres, carved by the United Kingdom's longest river, crowned by hills formed from rocks more than 1,200 million years old, and bearing the fingerprints of nearly every chapter of English history. Here, a medieval bishop became a saint, a composer was born in a village ten kilometres from the county town, and a famous sauce was invented and still made by a company called Lea and Perrins. The questions worth asking are how this rural county became so central to English military, industrial, and cultural life, and what traces all of that still leaves today.

• 2. A Land Shaped by Rivers and Hills

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  Worcestershire Beacon rises to 425 metres, the highest point in the county, part of the Malvern Hills that run south from the county into Herefordshire. The rocks making up those hills are among the oldest exposed anywhere in Britain, some dating back more than 1,200 million years. They are designated as a National Landscape, and the western border with Herefordshire traces their ridge line. Below the hills, the county opens into undulating farmland and the broad plain of the Severn valley. The River Severn, the UK's longest river, enters from the north and flows through Bewdley, Stourport-on-Severn, and Worcester before continuing south. The River Avon passes through Evesham and meets the Severn at Tewkesbury, just over the border in Gloucestershire. In the south-east lies a small portion of the Cotswolds, while the north-west holds the Wyre Forest, a national nature reserve. A broad green belt, widening to over 16 kilometres in places, wraps around much of the county, first drawn up in the 1950s as a barrier to the spread of Birmingham.

• 3. From Hwicce to Mercia

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  Seven hundred thousand years ago, people were already present in what would become Worcestershire. The area grew predominantly agricultural in the Bronze Age, and by the Iron Age hill forts dominated the landscape. Roman occupation then ended that pattern swiftly, introducing the villa system in the Cotswolds and the Vale of Evesham, and making the settlement of Droitwich, known to them as Salinae, among the county's most important places because of its salt production. After the Romans, the territory became the heartland of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the Hwicce, absorbed into Mercia in the seventh century. By 927, with the formation of the Kingdom of England, Worcestershire was already functioning as an administrative unit. Its purpose was partly defensive, organised around the estates of the See of Worcester, the Abbeys of Pershore, Westminster, and Evesham, and the framework of hundreds for managing outlying resources. The last known Anglo-Saxon Sheriff of Worcestershire was Cyneweard of Laughern.

• 4. Conquest and Conflict

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  Bishop Wulfstan, the last Anglo-Saxon bishop in England, remained in his post at Worcester until his death in 1095, supporting William the Conqueror rather than opposing him and overseeing a major reconstruction of Worcester Cathedral. The first Norman sheriff, Urse d'Abetot, built the castle of Worcester and seized large amounts of church land, setting off a prolonged dispute with the Bishop over the rights of the sheriff. Wulfstan was later made a saint. By 1086, when the Domesday Book recorded the county, the Crown had no authority in seven of the twelve hundreds covering Worcestershire; power there rested with the Bishop and the abbots at Pershore and Evesham. In 1263, Worcester's Jewish residents were attacked by a baronial force led by Robert Earl Ferrers and Henry de Montfort, with most killed. The massacre was part of the campaign building toward the Second Barons' War. Just two years later, on the 4th of August 1265, Simon de Montfort was killed at the Battle of Evesham. In 1275, the surviving Jews were expelled from Worcester and forced to move to Hereford. The county then endured the English Civil War from 1642, when the Battle of Powick Bridge opened the conflict. The final act came in 1651 at the Battle of Worcester, after which around 10,000 mostly Scottish prisoners were sent into forced labour in the New World or deployed in fen drainage schemes.

• 5. Industry, Carpets, and Sauce

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  Kidderminster's fame as a centre for carpet manufacture grew through the nineteenth century, while Redditch became known for needles, springs, and hooks, and Worcester developed as a centre for gloves and, earlier, for porcelain. Droitwich Spa sat atop large salt deposits and had been a salt-production hub since Roman times. Worcestershire also holds the world's oldest continually published newspaper: Berrow's Journal, established in 1690. The northern part of the county, already involved in iron production before the Civil War, became part of the Black Country during the Industrial Revolution. In Malvern, the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment developed thermal imaging and pyroelectric infrared detectors. Liquid crystal displays were developed there in 1972 in conjunction with the Royal Radar Establishment, which had also been the site where Geoffrey Dummer invented the concept of the integrated circuit in 1952. The site is now a large facility owned by QinetiQ. Meanwhile, Lea and Perrins continues to make Worcestershire sauce in Worcester itself, a product that the DreamWorks director Chris Miller described as "hugely popular in the States."

• 6. Culture, Cricket, and Elgar

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  Edward Elgar was born in Broadheath, a village about ten kilometres northwest of Worcester, and the county has carried his legacy ever since. Tolkien's connection to Worcestershire is just as personal. He wrote that any corner of the county was "in an indefinable way 'home' to me, as no other part of the world is", and it is claimed the county inspired the Shire in his fiction. Tolkien is thought to have named Bilbo Baggins' house "Bag End" after his Aunt Jane's Worcestershire farm. Worcestershire is also one of three counties associated with the Border Morris style of English folk dancing, with Worcestershire Monkey as one of its characteristic dances. Worcestershire County Cricket Club, formed officially in 1865 and playing at its New Road ground since 1895, has won five County Championships, most recently in 1989. That ground today holds 5,500 spectators. Kidderminster Harriers Football Club, originally founded in 1877 as a running club, became the county's first Football League members when they won the Conference title in 2000, only to be relegated back in 2005 after five years in the league.

• 7. Broadcasting Across Borders

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  Worcestershire's role in British broadcasting history is easy to overlook from the outside, but it shaped how the country communicated during its darkest periods. In 1939, the BBC bought the Wood Norton site near Evesham and fitted it with a dozen temporary studios intended for use if London were evacuated. By 1940, Wood Norton had become one of the largest broadcasting centres in Europe, with an average output of 1,300 radio programmes a week. Linguists, many of them foreign nationals, were hired at the site to monitor broadcasts from Europe; they were later relocated to Caversham Park in early 1943 to free space at Wood Norton as a backup national broadcast centre against the threat of V-weapons. Nearby, the Droitwich Transmitting Station near Wychbold carries BBC Radio 5 Live, Absolute Radio, and Talksport on medium wave, and BBC Radio 4 on long wave, and holds the BBC's most powerful long-wave transmitter. During the Second World War, coded messages embedded in normal broadcasts at Droitwich were received by the French Resistance. The Woofferton Transmitting Station, close to the county's north-western border, broadcast Voice of America short-wave transmissions into Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War, and both sets of transmitters remain in use today.