• A Simple Method for Predicting the Consequences of Land Management in Urban Habitats

      Young, Christopher; Jarvis, Peter (Springer New York, 2001)
      Land management in urban areas is characterized by the diversity of its goals and its physical expression in the landscape, as well as by the frequency and often rapidity of change. Deliberate or accidental landscape alterations lead to changes in habitat, some of which may be viewed as environmentally beneficial, others as detrimental. Evaluating what is there and how changes may fit into the landscape context is therefore essential if informed land-management decisions are to be made. The method presented here uses a simple ecological evaluation technique, employing a restricted number of evaluation criteria, to gather a spatially complete data set. A geographical information system (GIS) is then used to combine the resulting scores into a habitat value index (HVI). Using examples from Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom, existing real-world data are then applied to land-management scenarios to predict probable landscape ecological consequences of habitat alteration. The method provides an ecologically relevant, spatially complete evaluation of a large, diverse area in a short period of time. This means that contextual effects of land-management decisions can be quickly visualized and remedial or mitigating measures incorporated at an early stage without the requirement for complex modeling and prior to the detailed ecological survey. The strengths of the method lie in providing a detailed information baseline that evaluates all habitats, not just the traditional “quality” habitats, in a manner that is accessible to all potential users—from interested individuals to professional planners. (Springer Verlag)
    • Butterfly Activity in a Residential Garden

      Young, Christopher (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 2008)
      Butterflies are a highly visible, well-loved, and well-studied part of Britain's native fauna, yet there is still very little known about how butterflies use one of the country's most commonly available habitats, the residential garden. Studies in a Wolverhampton (UK) garden demonstrate that the majority of individuals use these spaces as movement routes through the urban matrix. Of 516 observed individual visits by butterflies over three recording seasons (2000–2002), only 13.8% involved a stop for some purpose. The duration of these visits was characteristically short, with a mean visit time of nine seconds. Individuals tended to fly through the study garden using distinct entry and exit points largely dictated by variations in structure within the study garden and in the immediately surrounding gardens. Individual garden use by butterflies would therefore seem to be defined as much by structural imperatives as by availability of nectar- or food-plant species. When considered as systems of interconnected green spaces on the level of the housing block (defined as a continuous area of residential land use bounded by infrastructure or contrasting land uses) and of the urban area as a whole, residential gardens represent an extraordinarily valuable and dynamic component of the urban habitat.
    • Sunbeam (Artefacts)

      Altintzoglou, Evripidis (Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 2014)
      The Sunbeam project consists of a typology of gates of abandoned industrial sites in the Wolverhampton area, documenting a transition in local economic history. The design of industrial gates is generally driven by functionality and not by aesthetic concerns. Yet, the passage of time and labour have left marks of certain aesthetic interest on these gates, transforming them into iconic monuments of an industrial past that played a major part in the formation of the region’s modern identity. All images were shot in a positive manner under complimentary bright daylight in order to avoid the common melancholic approaches to similar subjects. This allows for conflicting dialectics to come into play, which reconfigure Walter Benjamin’s notion of the ‘ruin’ and revise the ‘straight’ and objective methodology that drives photographic typologies after Bernd and Hilla Becher, and the Düsseldorf School of Photography. As a result, these gates and by extension the industrial history of the Black Country area are celebrated as monuments of a glorious past and in return they offer an optimistic approach towards the future in reference to the city’s moto: From Darkness Cometh Light. The documented sites are located in the immediate area around the Sunbeam factory (the triangle formed between Penn Road - Birmingham Road - Drayton Street) and the area between the train station and the canal side (triangle formed by Walsall Street - Horseley Fields - Middle Cross). A number of these sites are currently undergoing regeneration with new types of businesses and buildings rapidly taking their place.
    • The Characterisation of Settled Dust by Scanning Electron Microscopy and Energy Dispersive X-ray Analysis

      Shilton, Vaughan F.; Giess, Paul; Mitchell, David J.; Williams, Craig D. (Springer Verlag, 2002)
      Settled dust has been collected inside the main foyers of three University buildings in Wolverhampton City Centre, UK. Two of the three buildings are located in a street canyon used almost exclusively by heavy duty diesel vehicles. The dust was collected on adhesive carbon spectro-tabs to be in a form suitable for analysis by scanning electron microscope and energy dispersive X-ray analysis. Using these analytical techniques, individual particle analysis was undertaken for morphology and chemistry. Seasonal variations and variations due to location were observed in both the morphological measurements and chemical analysis. Many of the differences appear attributable to the influence of road traffic, in particular, the heavy duty diesel vehicles, travelling along the street canyon. (Springer Verlag)
    • 'The office boy’s triumph': deceit and display in early twentieth-century Wolverhampton

      Benson, John (Taylor & Francis, 2017-04-25)
      Insofar as the ‘Varley affair’ of 1917 is remembered today, it is the preserve of local historians and those interested in the development of local government. There is only one extended study. In the edited volume Corruption in Urban Politics and Society, Britain 1780-1950, that John Smith and James Moore published in 2007, Smith contributed a chapter on the affair which he entitled ‘”Ingenious and Daring”: The Wolverhampton Council Fraud 1905-17’. He begins by setting out the key points of what happened. The case in question concerned Jesse Varley, accountant clerk to Wolverhampton education committee who between 1905 and 1917 defrauded the Corporation of a total of £84,335 (about £5 million in today’s values). His crime eventually came to light when an office boy reported his suspicions to the town clerk. Varley was arrested, tried and found guilty of larceny, falsification of accounts and forgery: he was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude. There was an element of serendipity, it must be said, in Varley’s downfall. Although those working in his office had harboured their suspicions about him for some years, it was apparently only when one of them, Osmond Richards, decided to check how much teachers at his old school were taking home that he discovered payments (supposedly) being made to members of staff whom he knew had never existed. The uncovering of the ‘Varley affair’, trumpeted the Wolverhampton Chronicle, was ‘The Office Boy’s Triumph’. In fact, as we shall see, Richards worked as a ‘Junior Clerk’ (or ‘Junior Assistant’) rather than as an ‘Office Boy’. The misunderstanding presumably arose either because local journalists knew a good headline when they saw one or because junior staff in the Education Department were sometimes referred to collectively – and dismissively – as ‘the office boys’.
    • The Relationships between Indoor and Outdoor Respirable Particulate Matter: Meteorology, Chemistry and Personal Exposure

      Shilton, Vaughan F.; Giess, Paul; Mitchell, David J.; Williams, Craig D. (Sage Publications, 2002)
      Respirable particulate matter was collected inside and outside of a building located in Wolverhampton city centre during the same time period between 19/9/00 and 1/5/01. A total of 103 pairs of indoor and outdoor mea surements were made using Casella personal dust moni tors. The building monitored was located in a small street canyon produced by 4- and 5-storey buildings on both sides of the road. The road is the main approach road to a major bus station and is used by large numbers of heavy-duty diesel vehicles each day. The mean con centration for outdoor samples was 27.6 and 9.8 µg.m-3 for indoor samples. The mean indoor/outdoor ratio for this period was 0.4 (±0.02 SE). Meteorological variables including wind speed, wind direction and precipitation were measured at a nearby urban monitoring station. A greater wind speed caused an increase in the quantity of outdoor generated particulates penetrating indoors. Wind direction affected both indoor and outdoor particu late concentrations, with lower concentrations being ob served when the wind direction was parallel to the street canyon. The indoor/outdoor ratio also showed a de crease during parallel wind conditions. During days with high amounts of precipitation, the concentration of par ticulates, both indoors and outdoors, decreased signifi cantly. The personal exposure of a building occupant was measured for 20 working days in conjunction with outdoor and indoor measurements. Personal exposure concentrations were well correlated with indoor concen trations (r2 = 0.98). Forty of the indoor and outdoor partic ulate samples of dust were chemically analysed for sul phate, nitrate, chloride, zinc, copper, manganese and aluminium to determine any indoor/outdoor relation ships of particulate chemistry and any interrelationships between the analytes. (Sage Publications)
    • The Wolverhampton Express and Star and the depiction of the volunteer soldier in the First World War, 1914-1916

      Badsey, Stephen; Faber, Adrian; School of Social, Historical and Political Studies, Faculty of Arts, Business and Social Sciences (University of Wolverhampton, 2022-11)
      This thesis examines Britain’s provincial evening press during the era of voluntarism in the First World War. It uses as its example, the Express and Star, the evening newspaper in the Black Country industrial town of Wolverhampton. The newspaper harnessed the home front’s fascination with the volunteer soldier for its own commercial purposes. The study demonstrates that the commercial nature of the press was a central element in shaping the newspaper’s depiction of the volunteer soldier between the outbreak of war in August 1914 and the introduction of conscription in January 1916. Using both advertising and journalistic techniques, the Express and Star adopted the figure of the volunteer soldier as a commercial mascot in order to attract readership and generate favourable publicity to satisfy advertisers. The newspaper was fortunate in that the volunteer also fitted its Liberal tenets of self-determination and freedom of the individual. The study explains the significance of the wartime provincial evening press as being the daily newspaper reading of people in a working-class town like Wolverhampton. It sets the patriotic figure of the volunteer in the context of the commercial press, the development of human-interest journalism and the Liberal views held by the owners and Editor of the Express and Star. The evidence shows how the patriotic figure of the volunteer soldier was absorbed into, and then shaped by, the increasingly sophisticated business model of the provincial evening press. This required constant effort to maintain and increase readership to attract advertising. The volunteer soldier became a central figure in this sales drive.