Cradley is a village in the Black Country and Metropolitan Borough of Dudley near Halesowen and the banks of the River Stour. Colley Gate is the name of the short road in the centre of Cradley. It was part of the ancient parish of Halesowen, but unlike much of the rest of that parish, which was an exclave of Shropshire, Cradley was always in Worcestershire, until the creation of the West Midlands county in 1974. This meant that for civil administrative purposes, Cradley formerly had the officers which a parish would have had. The population of the appropriate Dudley Ward taken at the 2011 census was 13,340.

Dudley is a market town in the West Midlands, England, 6 miles (9.7 km) southeast of Wolverhampton and 8 miles (13 km) northwest of Birmingham. Historically part of Worcestershire, the town is the administrative centre of the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley. In the 2011 census, it had a population of 79,379. The Metropolitan Borough, which includes the towns of Stourbridge and Halesowen, had a population of 312,900. In 2014, the borough council adopted a slogan describing Dudley as the capital of the Black Country, a title by which it had long been informally known.