Bargate Drive Wolverhampton WV6 0QW
We came to take a look at St Andrew’s Church, but lingered longer to take a look at the adjacent Avion Centre.
A Sixties shopping centre serving the Whitmore Reans area.
Containing a variety of retail outlets, topped off by residential properties.
The name Whitmore is said by toponymists to come from the Old English hwit – white, and mor – moor – which was used to describe a marshy area, possibly a foggy area of marsh land, and Reans is said to possibly mean a type of furrow created during ploughing, designed to drain the land.
The terraced housing that makes up the Whitmore Reans residential area was built alongside roads, cartways and tracks that radiated out from the town centre servicing fields that spread out towards Dunstall and Tettenhall.
In 1924, the Courtaulds Company started constructing a factory on the former site of Dunstall Hall. Operating from 1926 onwards, the factory produced rayon yarn. Known to many generations and a visible landmark in Whitmore Reans and beyond for almost fifty years were the Courtaulds chimneys, known as the ‘three sisters’. They were demolished in June 1973. The Farndale housing estate now stands on the former Courtaulds grounds.
The area’s population displays its recent history of immigration in the diversity of its residents. There are English, Afro-Caribbean, Asian, Polish, Kurdish, African, Irish and many other ethnicities residing in Whitmore Reans
