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Turnpike roads
The clayland roads were notorious even when all roads were bad. Never
properly founded, rarely and grudgingly repaired, they were obstacles rather
than aids to travel. They lacked surface, rain, and ditch. Deep and narrow
holloways on slopes that became water-courses in rain, strips of morass
hundreds of yards wide across valleys, dangerous unpaved fords with a flimsy
footbridge at best, these were the traveller's lot. Improvement only began
with the setting up of Turnpike Trusts, and came but slowly. The Birmingham
to Edgehill Turnpike (Stratford Road) and the Birmingham to Warmington
Turnpike (Warwick Road) were created in 1725-6. Tollgates and keepers'
cottages were built at the 'Mermaid', Greet Mill, Cole Bank (School Road
Hall Green), and at Acocks Green. Money and engineers were provided to
improve the worst stretches, but for labour local parishioners were still
called upon to perform their ancient six days a year stint. Effective
drainage of flood-meadows was still a century away, and it was necessary to
build causeways over them, to pave fords and later to bridge them. The
gorges had to be filled up and the sharpest turns reduced, or entirely new
stretches laid down.
After 1745 milestones had to be provided: on the Warwick Road they were
sited almost opposite Greet School and on Tyseley Hill (2 and 3 miles from
the 'Mermaid'), and on the Stratford Road (which was the highway to London
until the Telford improvements to the Coventry Road ninety years later) the
stones showed the distance from the capital - 114 miles on the one opposite
the Park gates. Fifty years after their establishment the Turnpikes were
required to make drastic improvements, but tolls were raised by a half to
pay for them. In 1780 William Hutton could still report that both roads were
'much used and much neglected'. However they were to become so much better
that by 1836 the journey from Birmingham to London was being completed in 12
hours including stops. In addition to the inns there were smithies en route,
by Greet Mill tollgate, opposite Greet Farm, and on Tyseley Hill.
Aris's Birmingham Gazette recorded the dangers of road travel in later
Georgian times. Footpads haunted the Turnpikes. One Jones a milliner was
beaten and robbed of 22 guineas at Spark Brook, and one Mander, knocked from
his horse by a rope stretched across the Stratford Road near Formans Lane,
was relieved of his purse. A man unnamed lost £5 to a footpad 'at the bottom
of Wake Green', and Mr. Swinburne (the Hall Green schoolmaster) was robbed
near Greet Mill. He was lucky, because a horseman pursued the footpad across
the Common and caught him. There is no record of a gibbet on either Turnpike
as there was at Washwood Heath to discourage highway robbers. The Gazette
printed dire warnings by the lords of Yardley Manor of the consequences of
poaching. The Grevises jealously retained their sole fishing rights in the
Cole, a trout stream, and their successors, the wealthy Taylors, were no
less concerned to maintain their privileges. In those times before
refrigerated meat came from abroad, game and fish were important sources of
winter protein to rich and poor alike; the latter risked buckshot,
man-traps, and deportation for poaching, but it continued as long as there
was anything to poach!
Bridges
In 1752 and 1759 horses were drowned while fording the Cole at Greet Mill.
Later the county (Worcestershire) built a bridge over the river: there was
one already over the mill-race. The Warwick Road had had a bridge since at
the latest 1725: it was drawn with two arches on Beighton's map. A 1766 plan
of Greet Farm shows five arches, the outer ones for flood-water under the
approach causeway. This bridge was rebuilt 11 years later. It had been badly
damaged in a flood which had swept away the timber footbridge at Formans
Lane - not for the first or last time. As still happens at Greet Mill
bridge, gravel tended to pile up against the piers, and by the start of the
19th century the river was flowing in two channels round an
island. It should be remembered that the Cole was then a larger stream than
now. Not only were there more tributaries fed by woods and bogs, but much of
the rain which is now taken into drains and sewers formerly found its way to
the river. Depletion of the gravelly water-table by wells and pumps has
dried up many of the brooks, and the survivors in their culverts lack
replenishment.
Damage by flood in 1807 made the Warwick Road Bridge unusable, and the
Yardley Overseers were indicted for their failure to repair it. A major
reconstruction followed and this survived until the most recent rebuilding,
by Yardley Rural District Council in 1902. Formans Road Bridge was rebuilt
as a road bridge a few years later. The streets between the Stratford Road
and Stoney Lane stopped short of the Spark Brook until it had been culverted
in 1896. The Showell Green Brook was straightened when the Park was laid out
in 1904, and culverted under the Stratford Road and down to the Cole.
Administration
Since the reign of Elizabeth I parishes had been obliged to appoint their
own overseers for Highways and Poor Relief. These unpaid and untrained
officials, drawn in turn from among the wealthier tenants, could not be
expected to administer the affairs of the whole of a very large parish, so
Yardley originally had three sets of Overseers for areas bounded by
highways: Church End north of the Coventry Road, Greet north of the Warwick
Road, and Broomhall south of it. Doubtless it was the power of the Greswolds
which caused the name of Greet, at the far west end of the area, to be given
to the whole. Population growth in the south brought a later division: from
the 17th century there were four nominal Quarters, all of Yardley
south and west of the Stratford Road becoming Swanshurst Quarter. See my
booklet ‘Swanshurst Quarter’.
The overseers continued to serve, in the guise of parish councillors with
paid officials and servants, until the formation of the Rural District
Council in 1894. They were the same people thereafter, with different hats.
Joseph Malins, whose home in Wilton Road has been demolished, was their
leader, a great man in local affairs and ‘a power at County Hall’. He did so
much for Yardley. The Rural District Council met first in the Sparkhill
Institute, which had been built a few years before, opposite Inglewood
Road.
The 1930 building
on its site was first a Commercial then a Boys’ Secondary School, and is now
the Sparkhill Centre. Eighty years ago Worcestershire feared that Yardley
would vote to join Birmingham, a wealthy City which was offering
blandishments to its neighbour districts. So the County hurried to provide
public buildings in advertisement of itself. Police and Fire Stations, large
schools at Springfield and a magnificent Council House. This was built on
the Hill, population centre of the District, not in the backwater village
far to the north. The Rural District Council sat in the fine Aston Hall-ish
building from 1902 until 1912 only. Then, with Yardley having voted to
become part of Greater Birmingham, it declined to housing a suburban library
and a sub-registry. But the initials ‘YDC’ (looking ahead to future
importance as an Urban District) may still be seen above the porches, and
its denizens still call it the Council House. Most of those who voted for
the City’s promised amenities and services were recent immigrants, refugees
from sooty slums, quickly populating the new terrace streets of Greet,
Sparkhill, and Springfield. The out-voted natives continued to think of
themselves as Wigornians, and never spoke of ‘town’ but always of
‘Birmingham’, which to them was the foreign city in the next county.
Introduction
Preface
Relief and drainage, geology, and the natural
landscape
First footers and Anglo-Saxon
settlement
The manor of Yardley, the boundaries
of Yardley, and the 'Manor' of Greet
Ancient roads, ancient buildings, and watermills
Turnpike roads, bridges, and administration
Public transport
Enclosures
Urbanisation, and amenities and services
Churches, schools, and commerce and industry
Between the Wars and since, and references
Maps |
