| Yardley into Birmingham
The ever-faster growth of building and population in what was
still so largely a rural district strained the quite inadequate
administrative machine and its provision of services. Yardley
lacked most of the necessities of urban life - road surfaces,
drains, and lighting, baths, pure water, refuse collection, hospitals,
libraries, inter-district transport. Birmingham water reached
Acocks Green in 1890, and thirteen years later there were new
mains to the 'town' of Sparkhill. Gas from the City also became
available to the new housing areas. The Rural District Council
received much help from Worcestershire, which feared the loss
of Yardley to Birmingham. The county provided the new Council
House on Stratford Road, in 1902, and police stations at Hay Mills
and Yardley Road. (Until then Acocks Green's police and firemen
had shared the house in Warwick Road opposite Dudley Park Road).
The Rural District Council bought the Yardley/Solihull Fever Hospital
at Lyndon End in 1909, spent a lot of money on main roads and
bridges, and planned for the future: the sewage farm at Deep More,
all too close to new houses and incapable of enlargement, was
to be closed and a new sewer laid to the Cole Hall sewage works,
and Yardley was to be developed on Garden City lines, with the
Cole and some tributaries as green ribbons of meadowland, but
all was to no avail. The new Yardleians were mostly Brummies,
and they voted to rejoin the City, which promised them the best
of services and amenities.
When the First World War began, a start had been made on the
immense task of road improvement and lighting, and of mains-laying.
The bridges over the Cole on Stratford and Formans Roads were
replaced (1912-13), and the canal bridge over Kings Road (1913).
An electricity generating station was built in Evelyn Road, Sparkhill.
Other construction work tailed off only gradually during the first
two years of the War, and resumed as materials became available
after it. In 1918 the South Birmingham Town Planning Scheme was
published: it accepted the plan for the Cole and other valleys,
proposed the zoning of industry separate from housing, new highways
and improved old ones, preservation of trees, grass verges, and
development at a maximum of twelve houses to the acre. In Yardley
there were six thousand acres to be developed. Acocks Green got
a new fire station behind the police station on Alexander Road
c. 1923.
The marked lack of north-south roads through the former Rural
District was to be remedied by four schemes. Highfield/Fox Hollies/Stockfield
Roads were to become dual carriageways one hundred and twenty
feet wide, with a central reservation of grass and trees: a new
short road was to link Fox Hollies and Stockfield Roads directly
across Warwick Road. Woodcock and Clay Lanes were to be widened
as part of a highway from Shirley Road via Dolphin Lane to Coventry
Road. A completely new route was planned to link Stratford and
Warwick Roads, from Cateswell Road to Tyseley Hill: and another
was to make good the lack of a riverside highway, linking Sarehole
and Bromyard Roads to roads north from Titterford and south from
East Greet, where there would be a junction with an east-west
highway designed to bypass Tyseley and Acocks Green. Cateswell/Tynedale
Road is long since complete, but the other schemes have not progressed
since 1939, with the exception that some work looks imminent at
Stockfield Road. The riverside route stops at Formans Road.
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