| Woods and commons
The leafy lanes and hedges of remembered rural Yardley were the
legacy of 18th-19th century enclosure and tree-planting. The Georgian
landscape was a bare one, with a few small copses only surviving
long enough to be recorded on maps. Thus we find Chapel Hurst
south of Tyseley Hall, and Wood Close on the manor bound south
of Warwick Road. When there were still woods in the middle and
south of Yardley, waggons would rumble along the drier lanes of
summer, carrying great oaken timbers to coastal shipyards. They
returned with beams from broken-up vessels for use in house-building.
Pinfold House has some of these in its construction. Yardley's
commons did not survive the final enclosures of the 1840s (though
part of the largest, Yardley Wood and Billesley Commons have been
returned to public use since the City bought them). The others
were small and encroached upon. The scatter of houses along Tanyard
Lane probably began as squatters' hovels. Their builders had taken
advantage of the law of Arden which permitted them to stay on
common land if they could erect a hut overnight and have smoke
coming from its roofhole at dawn. The hamlet at Acocks Green may
have developed similarly.
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