 It stands on land which once straddled the border of Dudley County Borough and Sedgley Urban District, which were in the counties of Worcestershire and Staffordshire respectively.The borders were moved back several hundred yards in 1926 when Dudley Council purchased the land with a view to building council houses to rehouse more than 2,000 families from town centre slums.Hundreds of council houses had already been built across the Dudley Borough in the last decade, but the Priory Estate was to be the largest council housing development yet in the area as the town's slum problem was still far from being solved.