Birchills is a residential area of

Walsall Walsall (, or ; locally ) is a market town and administrative centre in the West Midlands County, England. Historically part of Staffordshire, it is located north-west of Birmingham, east of Wolverhampton and from Lichfield. Walsall is th ...

in the West Midlands of

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

. The appropriate Walsall ward is Birchills Leamore. The population of this ward taken at the 2011 census was 14,775. It is situated several hundred yards west of the town centre and is an established area containing many different housing types, though Victorian/Edwardian terraced houses and inter-war council houses are the most frequent type. Reedswood Park is located in Birchills, as is Pouk Hill - a hill which inspired a 1970s

Slade Slade are an English rock band formed in Wolverhampton in 1966. They rose to prominence during the glam rock era in the early 1970s, achieving 17 consecutive top 20 hits and six number ones on the UK Singles Chart. The ''British Hit Singles ...

song. Birchills has an above average proportion of ethnic minorities living in it, mostly

Pakistan Pakistan ( ur, ), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ( ur, , label=none), is a country in South Asia. It is the world's fifth-most populous country, with a population of almost 243 million people, and has the world's second-lar ...

i Muslims. Birchills formerly was served by Birchills railway station which was on the Chase Line but closed in the 1930s. Several tower blocks, built during the 1960s, are situated in the east of Birchills, near Walsall town centre. Murderer

Raymond Leslie Morris The Cannock Chase murders (also known as the A34 murders and the Babes in the Ditch murders) were the murders of three girls aged between 5 and 7 that occurred in Staffordshire, England, between 1965 and 1967. The bodies of all three children we ...

was living in one of these flats with his wife at the time of his arrest on 4 November 1967. A

power station A power station, also referred to as a power plant and sometimes generating station or generating plant, is an industrial facility for the generation of electric power. Power stations are generally connected to an electrical grid. Many ...

was opened in the north of Birchills in 1949, just a few years before the

Beechdale Beechdale, originally named Gypsy Lane Estate, is a housing estate in Walsall, England, that was developed predominantly during the 1950s and 1960s. Education Beechdale Infant School for 5-7 year olds opened on the estate in 1955 in Remington Ro ...

council estate was developed at the far side. This power station served the Walsall area for 33 years until its closure in October 1982, although it was not demolished until March 1987. The site of the power station was redeveloped for housing and commerce during the 1990s.

References

Walsall {{WestMidlands-geo-stub