A SURPRISING number of well-known district names appear in the latest list of super-rich people in the Midlands.

Kidderminster carpets boss Michael Brinton, ranking high among industrial money makers at 29th on the list and with an estimated £55 million fortune, is this year running neck and neck with money-spinning Wyre Forest personality, rock legend Robert Plant.

While Michael Brinton and family have slipped back a place compared with last year's list (compiled from a variety of sources and brought together in the Birmingham Post this month) Robert Plant was two places ahead over the year having gained £5 million over last year's reckoning. The Brinton fortune was thought to have stayed about the same.

Comments on Mr Brinton's track record in recent months have centred on his efforts to champion the cause of business staying with sterling and shunning the Euro though supporting the Common Market.

Mr Brinton has made clear the family company, run in a traditional way, would not want to go public. It employs 2,500 people world-wide and scooped a Queens Award for Export last year although it saw a profits fall to £7.37 million from £9.1 million.

Robert Plant, concentrating on blues music, continues to pack the concert halls after 30 years in the business. With guitarist Jimmy Page he formed Led Zeppelin in 1968 which became one of the top groups in the 1970s. He lives in an old Kidderminster farmhouse and backs Kidderminster Hospital campaign.

Wyre Forest's other claims to fame centre on names like the Ward family (£13 million, placed 56) of Baggeridge Brick, which has a factory at Hartlebury, and the Folkes family (£10 million placed 64) who owned Folkes Forge, in Kidderminster before it closed in 1999. Graham Waldron, now a tax exile in Jersey, who founded the Kidderminster-based carpet distributor MCD is placed 45 and is estimated to be worth £28 million.

Wyre Forest politicians in the ranks of the Midlands rich are cider-maker Esmond Bulmer (family fortune £150 million, placed 13) who was Conservative MP for Wyre Forest from 1974 until 1983 and Anthony Coombs, managing director in Birmingham's S&U loan company and also a former Conservative MP for the district. His family fortune is put at £20 million, ranking 48 on the Midlands list.

Finally the name of Castlemore Securities, developer of the newly opened retail park at Kidderminster's Crossley Park, comes up under owner and property millionaire Graham Whately (family fortune £120 million, placed 19.)