'The Crooked House'.

Saturday hello!

Hi Everyone!

Today Mr. Twins and myself went for a drive. It was such a lovely warm sunny day it almost felt like the middle of Summer and not the end of September. We drove over to Dudley in the West Midlands and visited one of our favourite spots. The Crooked House or 'Siden House'. The building has been a Midlands tourist attraction for well over a hundred years. The building is a typical Black Country pub, however, one side is four foot lower than the other as a result of subsidence from 19th Century coal mining. It was originally built as a farmhouse in 1765, it was then known as The Glynne Arms on becoming a public house. Now this is the amusing part.......Visitors can now experience a variety of optical illusions, including marbles rolling UPHILL and drinks sliding UP the table, before even touching a drop and as soon as you walk through the front door shown on the photograph you feel as though you have had too many to drink already! Well worth a visit.

We have visited The Crooked House numerous times and it never fails to amuse us. We had a nice lunchtime meal in the extended part at the back and then went for a walk nearby.





It is a place not to be missed in the Black Country. Now I expect my Friends are wondering why we call the Black Country by that name? The Black Country is a loosely defined area of the West Midlands. To the North and West of Birmingham. By the late 19th century, this area had become one of the most intensely industrialised in the nation. The South Staffordshire coal mines, the coal coking operations, and the iron foundries and steel mills that used the local coal to fire their furnaces produced a level of air pollution that had few equals anywhere in the world.

It is believed that The Black Country got its name because of pollution from these heavy industries that covered the area in black soot. The Black Country is also known for its distinctive dialect.

Lunch was lovely and afterwards we drove to Merry Hill Shopping Centre. The shops are fantastic. It was opened in 1985. Next to the shopping centre is the Waterfront which is a leisure area consisting of a number of restaurants and bars and an office complex which is based around the Dudley Canal No.1, which used to service the old Round Oak Steel Works, which is now the Merry Hill Shopping Centre. The canal runs from Tipton towards the Stourbridge Canal travelling under the town of Dudley and Dudley Castle via the Dudley tunnel, then on to Merry Hill and down through a flight of locks, known as the Delph Nine Locks (there are actually now only eight locks.





Hope you enjoyed the photos of an English pub although I can say there aren't any more of these crooked ones! This was always a regular place to go with my family when our children were little taking the Grandparents and enjoying a Saturday lunch.

Bye for now, have a good weekend all.