STEM Workshops in Dudley

The world's first practical steam engine began work in 1712 at the Coneygree coalworks near Dudley Castle; the Black Country Living Museum now operates the only full-size working replica, completed in 1986. The geology beneath the town is just as celebrated. Quarrymen at Wren's Nest found the Silurian limestone so rich in fossils that one trilobite, Calymene blumenbachii, became known as the Dudley Bug and featured on the town's coat of arms until 1974. In 1829 Foster, Rastrick and Company of Stourbridge built the Stourbridge Lion, the first steam locomotive to run in the United States, and in 1911 Noah Hingley and Sons of Netherton led the forging of the Titanic's great centre anchor, its shank forged by Walter Somers of Halesowen.

Abraham Darby, who first smelted iron with coke at Coalbrookdale in 1709 and set the Industrial Revolution in motion, was born in 1678 at Wren's Nest farm in Woodsetton, on the northern edge of Dudley. He followed a local tradition: the metallurgist Dud Dudley ran furnaces on Pensnett Chase in the 1620s, and his 1665 book Metallum Martis is one of the earliest accounts of smelting iron with coal. Wren's Nest drew Sir Roderick Murchison, whose 1839 study of the Silurian period leaned on its fossils. Later came Frederick Carder, the Stourbridge-trained glassmaker who joined Stevens and Williams in 1881 and co-founded the Steuben Glass Works in Corning, New York, in 1903.

The Black Country Living Museum welcomes school and college groups throughout the year, and its multi-million-pound Forging Ahead expansion centres on a new 1940s to 1960s town. Since 2020 the Black Country has been a UNESCO Global Geopark, with Wren's Nest among its key geosites. At Castle Hill, the Very Light Rail National Innovation Centre develops and tests next-generation trams on a dedicated test track, and the Black Country and Marches Institute of Technology opened nearby in 2021. Trams are due to return to Dudley town centre in 2026 when the new Metro extension opens.

A young engineer can go a long way without leaving the borough. Dudley College of Technology offers engineering and manufacturing courses and apprenticeships from Level 2 upwards, and the employer-led Black Country and Marches Institute of Technology, run with partners including the University of Wolverhampton, carries technical study from Level 4 to degree level in advanced manufacturing, modern construction methods, medical engineering and digital technologies. Rail engineering careers are taking shape around the Very Light Rail National Innovation Centre, employers across Brierley Hill's DY5 industrial estates recruit in aerospace, automotive and engineering, and the Stourbridge Glass Quarter keeps materials craft alive, hosting the biennial International Festival of Glass.