Black Country Living Museum is looking for memories from the
1940s to the 1950s of the Civic Restaurant that once stood on the corner of
Fisher Street and Birmingham Street in Dudley from 1948 until the 1980s. The
Museum plans to recreate the restaurant as part of its ambitious new
development project BCLM: Forging Ahead.
The recreated restaurant will offer visitors to the Museum a
chance to taste post-war life including National Bread and steamed jam puddings
plus hearty British dinners highlighting the shortages and challenges of eating
well in post war Britain.
Purpose built in 1948 the Civic Restaurant in Dudley was part
of a government led initiative to change popular wartime British restaurants
into civic restaurants. These aimed to provide affordable and nutritious food without
diners needing to use their precious personal rations and was particularly
important in the Black Country as many companies were too small to run canteens
for their workers.
Prior to this, most British Restaurants had been located in
makeshift venues like church halls, town halls and school buildings. Dudley’s
were in church halls at St John’s Kate’s Hill, King Street Methodist, and St
Christopher’s, on the Wren’s Nest estate. But a handful of councils looked at
Civic Restaurants as an opportunity to build brand new, modern and efficient
restaurants – Dudley was one of this pioneering group.
The Civic Restaurant, built by the bus station to a modern
pre-cast concrete design, was designed for mass dining, serving midday dinners,
coffees, teas and evening meals for to up to 200 people at a time. The
restaurant featured an open plan kitchen, a mural designed by local students
from Dudley Technical College, coffee room and a terrace. In later years it was
also hired out for private functions, dances and wedding receptions.
Dudley’s Central Civic Restaurant
was a great success to begin with, but as more prosperous times came to the
Black Country, diners began to look elsewhere for less basic cuisine, and the
restaurant began to struggle. Despite a revamp in 1954 as the Ednam Restaurant,
with new menus, jukeboxes, and carpets, by 1956 it had become unprofitable, and
closed later that year. The building was then used for several different
council purposes following its closure, most notable as the home of the Black
Country Museum Development Office from 1975-1984. The building was eventually
demolished to make way for Dudley’s new bus station with many fixtures and
fittings sold at public auction.
Do you have memories of dining or attending a function in
the restaurant in the 1940s to 1950s? Did you or anyone in your family eat,
join in a celebration or work in the Civic restaurant? Can you remember the
food, the decoration or even the mural?
Please get in touch with us by emailing [email protected] or by calling 0121 557 9643. For more information, visit www.bclm.com/forgingahead
