Transformer

Welcome to the Black Country, a region in the middle of England, with its own dialect and traditions; once the most heavily industrialised region on Earth, today it is routinely ignored, underestimated by the rest of the country.

Transformer brings together essays, poetry, and fiction that celebrate and interrogate the Black Country in equal measure, from its phantasmagoric geology, the legacies of its heavy industries and transformation of the landscape, to its flux of working-class cultures and the search for a multiplicity of new directions in the twenty-first century.

Transformer captures the region's past, present, and future. This is the place where stories of the union leader Mary Macarthur, tragic football great Duncan Edwards, and revolutionary Malcolm X all cross paths, where the Titanic’s anchor and fresh Alphonso mangoes are holy relics, and where people lay out gardens and forests amid industrial desolation.

Transformer portrays a Black Country permanently in a state of remaking itself, plural and often contradictory in its urban-rural, fixed-dynamic, and traditional-radical dualities.