The expanded Pevsner Shropshire visits Snailbeach

In Church Stretton this morning, I treated myself to the Buildings of England volume on Shropshire by John Newman and Nikolaus Pevsner.

Ludlow? Schmudlow. I knew where to turn first:

Snailbeach is less lunar than it was before the great glistening white hills of mine waste were cleared away in 1994 but it is still an odd place It has no obvious centre, no coherent street pattern and little in the way of public amenities. 

The double-glazing and conservatory industries cannot disguise the origins of virtually every dwelling in a C19 worker's cottage of the most cramped and basic sort. The houses cling to ledges of extraordinarily steep N- and NW-facing hillsides or hide in the lush vegetation of a narrow valley and are reached along a maze of tracks which, more often than not, allow no through passage. This heartless development is the product of the Snailbeach lead mine, locally claimed to have been the richest in Europe.

Now do you see why I'm obsessed with the place?

And then there is the mine itself:

The remains comprise the country's most complete and atmospheric record of a nationally important industry. Between 1845 and 1913, British mines produced a total of 241,000 tonnes of lead of which more than half came from a Snailbeach.

You can see the great glistening white hills of mine waste, which were still there when I first visited Snailbeach, in the photo below.

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