A a few years ago an American art critic said Walsall was like "Ceaucescu's Romania with fast food outlets." What an art critic knows about anything, except for their own importance and how to flatter the poisonous clique that controls modern art, I don’t know, but it prompted the BBC to set up a web site to list nominations for the title ‘The ugliest place in the world.’ Bradford got a couple of passing mentions, but not as many as Croydon, Coventry or New Jersey.
I do not think Walsall is that bad, there are uglier towns near by (in the area and on these pages); the Arboretum and Nature Reserve just to the north of the centre gives Walsall the breathing space most towns lack; and their council have built a new art gallery and central library (whereas Bradford Council are destroying our Central Library, with only the vaguest promises as regards its replacement).  Some people just don’t know they’re born!  It also had one of the world’s finest web unofficial web sites. 

New Art Gallery
This has only been open a few years.  Will still be the ‘New’ gallery in a century, or do they reckon it, or western civilisation, will have collapsed before it becomes ‘old‘?  They reckon this place puts the town “...at the centre of the cultural map of Britain.” At least they have got something cultural that was not built in the time of our great great grandfathers. 
It does have products of some of the most profitable art manufactures ever, Monet and Van Gogh amongst them. 

Jerome K.  Jerome Museum

He wrote two of the funniest books in the english language (Three Men On A Boat and Three Men On A Bummel).  His dad was called Jerome Clapp Jerome (for reasons unknown) and his middle name was Klapka.  Not, apparently, named after his dad, but after a Hungarian General.  His life was an interesting one.
This museum is Jerome’s birth place, and is run by the Jerome K.  Jerome Society.  Literary societies, with the seeming exception of the P.G.  Wodehouse Society, tend to the snooty, snobby and incompetent, but this one is providing a useful by running this house in Bradford Place. 

Walsall Council’s website is simple and straight forward.  There is also a link to the above society from the museums page. 

Walsall

Ugly Walsall
When the town was named as such all the councillors stopped bickering with the other parties and fighting their own, sprung to their feet and started wittering and whining.  ‘Blah blah blah media bias!  Weee weee weee loverly countryside!  Wibble wibble wibble working for a brighter future.  ‘Neer neer nee neer neer nee neer nee not boring.‘
This prompted the creation of this site by one or more Walsall Council Tax payers, in an attempt to shame their council into doing things it should be doing anyway.  It has some marvellous photos, including one of Bradford Street, which is chillingly like the city it was named after, and an abandoned Reliant Robin!  I would have thought in a town the size of Walsall everyone would know all the Reliant owners, it’s not as if it could have been driven far or left by joy riders!
It was good to find pages even angrier than this one, and made us think that Bradford needs a site like this.  Piles of rubbish here lasts longer than the shops do.  Never mind expensive reports and pipe dreams, lets have some photos of things that need fixing.  Unfortunately the website was closed in 2002.  The web is not so much an information super highway as an information landfill site.  A web site that lasts longer than 3 years is a rarity.  However there is a postscript from the site's author if you click the link below.