Mains electricity
Despite the general gloom of the late Victorian period, many features of modernity were not especially slow to arrive in Brewood. The town had its own gas works from about 1872 until around World War I, when Stafford council took over the supply. Mains electricity arrived in 1928, and was available throughout the parish by 1940. The Four Ashes Manufacturing Company opened its carbon works in the early 1920s, beginning the transformation of Four Ashes into an industrial zone that now stretches both sides of the main Wolverhampton-Stafford road. That road, now the A449 road, was turned into a dual carriageway between 1936 and 1939, responding to the increasing importance of motor vehicles. The majority of the muddy or stony lanes that had isolated so much of the parish, including Brewood itself, yielded to tarmac between the wars or shortly after.