The last years of independence
The previous chapter has shown the impossibility of drawing
an arbitrary line at the turn of the century. From 1851 the growth
of population and the spread of building in Yardley were on ever-steepening
upward curves. Having increased eleven-fold in the half-century
from 1851, the population (33,946 in 1901) grew by 75% the next
decade to 59,126 at the time of absorption by Birmingham. The
associated development was not a steady outward growth from such
foci as Sparkhill and Acocks Green: while many streets were only
half-built, new ones were being laid out elsewhere. Building Societies
bought up farms (e.g. Grove Farm 1896), demolished them, and laid
out estates. These were notably different from most earlier housing
in their magnitude, involving great capital outlay, and their
uniformity of appearance. (On Knowle and Solihull Roads the terraces
are dead straight and identical for 500 yards). Whole streets
were often completed within a year or two by a single contractor.
The outstanding example of this large-scale development was the
Barber Trust estate between Walford, Barrows, Warwick, and Medlicott
Roads, largely built in the 1890s, and completed early in the
twentieth century. It is characterised by its neatness and uniformity.
The streets are wide and straight, flanked by long terraces of
2-storey tunnel-backs with entries, porches, and ground-floor
bays. Some rows open directly onto the street, but most have narrow
front gardens, and plane trees line the roadway. Every house was
painted a dull brown. The building of Benton Road roughly parallel
and very close to Spark Brook was made possible by the culverting
of what had now become a filthy ditch. (The brook is now above
ground only beyond Golden Hillock Road). The remaking of Stoney
Lane over the brook in 1896, largely at Birmingham's expense,
so that trams could reach the City-Yardley-Kings Norton boundary
(just beyond Esme Road) had encouraged the unlovely development
of that street, whose east side is in Yardley. Seven streets on
the west slope of Sparkhill were now complete down to the Lane,
each side having a practically continuous wall from end to end:
though individual villas or short terraces might have been built
at any time during the 1880s or 1890s, they were ultimately to
form a single unbroken facade. Tall tunnel-backs of 2 storeys
with sometimes a dormer or gabled attic above, they have tiny
front gardens and long narrow back ones. Decorative features are
still Georgian or Baroque: Gothic had a short run and little impact
in Yardley.
South of Durham Road, beginning with Ivor Road about the start
of the twentieth century, the family-name roads on Smith-Ryland
land continued their development until the war stopped it on Adria
Road. A gradual change of style is seen: the unit was always the
6-roomed house for the lower-middle class family, with a bathroom,
but this became lower and wider, with a larger front garden and
pavement trees, gated entries, decorative woodwork replacing fancy
bricks and mouldings, two-storey bays and pebble-dash appearing.
The modern 'semi' was only a war away. On the later roads, Doris
Road southwards, building stopped short of Stoney Lane, which
was to be widened under the Yardley (later South Birmingham) Development
Scheme.
From at least 1899, when Eastbourne Market was opened opposite
the Mermaid, the large villas and terraces of Stratford Road were
being converted to shops, their front gardens becoming forecourts.
Two districts, one from the Brook to the junction, the other about
the tram depot on 'The Hill', developed as shopping centres. They
were ultimately to merge (and bid fair to join up with the Springfield
centre). Corner shops, which abounded, were rarely built as such:
conversions from houses were usual even on main roads, and only
new districts had specially built shop rows.
In the late 1880s, a Technical Institute was opened on Stratford
Road (site of Sparkhill Boys' School), and there the Rural District
Council met from its formation until the Tudoresque Council House
opened in 1902. Two years later Yardley Secondary School was established
in the Institute, and Sparkhill Park (former Great Trust land
given to the R.D.C. as other grounds had been) was opened. Beside
the nobly-towered Council House, which bears the letters 'Y.D.C.',
a court-house and police station, and a fire station were added
to what might have become an urban centre, had Yardley remained
independent. The site was a good one, near the geographical and
population centre of the District, and on a tram route - electric
trams were going to Knowle Road by 1907. Opposite the Council
House was the Birmingham & Midland Women's Hospital in a converted
villa, until it moved to a new building across the park in 1905.
By that time, the whole area from the hidden Spark Brook south
to Greetmill Bridge, bounded on the west by Stratford Road and
on the east by Golden Hillock Road, east Greet (with its Fog Signal
Works and fireworks factory in the confluence meadows), and the
Cole, was completely built up. On the site of Greet Farm was the
Board School (1892), there was a small shopping centre on the
narrow Warwick Road, and St. Bede's Mission, an iron chapel, opened
in 1907. Golden Hillock School, and a Catholic School on Evelyn
Road, were built in l910. While the slate for Sparkhill's rooves
was imported by rail (the Council House had local tiles), the
brick walls were of good Yardley clay: though the Greet and Tyseley
Brickworks had closed, the Burbury Works' pit grew ever larger
and deeper.
The Grove Farm estate, begun in the late 1890s and similar
in style and status to the hill-slope streets, and the Springfield
estate of uniform terraces built early in the twentieth century
between Springfield Road and the river, were served by a developing
shop centre on the main road. A large Board School opened in 1900
on College Road, whose south side was already built up with 3-storey
terraces, and there were more villas on and near Wake Green Road.
Schools, police stations, and public houses were usually built
in terracotta and glazed brick, with heavy baroque decorations.
By 1911, Green Bank estate between Stratford Road and the new
Sarehole Road was under construction. Though still in tunnel-back
terraces, the houses are clearly transitional to post-war 'semi's'.
The compact developments so far described in this chapter were
in complete contrast with the unaffected area south of a line
between St. Agnes' Church and Acocks Green House. The natural
outward spread from Birmingham, (the accelerating pace of immigration
indicated by the rapid completion of the newer estates compared
with the fitful upbuilding of the earlier streets), was very clearly
associated with the provision of public transport. There were
trams to Springfield and trains to Acocks Green: but for nearly
all of Swanshurst and Broomhall Quarters there were still only
horses and bicycles and ill-made lanes.
Acocks Green was a middle-class Edgbaston, a low-density detached
suburb of the City. In 1909, a large school at Westley Brook,
and a new police station on Yardley Road, were overdue improvements.
By 1911 the district had peripheral development to add to infillings.
There were terraces on Fox Hollies Road, and on Warwick Road about
the Dolphin, villas on Oxford Road, and three straight endless-terrace
streets north of the railway: Alexander and Douglas Roads, and
Florence Road.
The main shopping centre was the narrow part of Warwick Road
just east of Westley Brook, and a second one grew along Yardley
Road. A large laundry was built at the Olton boundary. A smaller
Barber Estate of two long rows occupied one side of the extended
Avenue: on Lincoln Road, terraces faced the boundary.
In 1907 the North Warwickshire Line of the G.W.R. was laid
from Tyseley, where a new station was built, south through the
ridge to the Cole valley: sidings and a large engine shed appeared
in the meadows of Tyseley Brook. The station's comparative nearness
hastened, if it did not bring about, the development of Manor
Farm and Roma Roads north of Warwick Road, and the Weston Lane
- Reddings Lane five-street terrace estate opposite. Formans Road
School opened in 1907. This small district was Completed in 1911,
a year after Yardley Secondary School and a Methodist Church,
by the erection of a fine high-banked terrace on the curving slope
of Warwick Road that led to them. Though the main road was now
intermittently built up through Yardley, the large farms to south
(Tyseley, Greet Mill Hill, Shaftmoor) and north (Manor House,
Hay Hall, Stockfield) clearly separated the urban areas of Sparkhill-Greet-Springfield,
Acocks Green, and Hay Mills. Between the last-named district,
(with its new factories among the terraces and the growing Waterloo
claypit (which now claimed land intended for new streets), the
canal, the east bound, and Coventry Road was another area of farmland,
comprising Waterloo, Moat, and Highfield Farms, and Kingsley House.
Terraces at the north end of Stockfield and Yardley Roads bisected
this area, whose eastern part included the cemetery and sewage
farm. Near the Swan there was now a shapeless district which included
large separate villas and terraces, some very humble rows and
cottages, mostly on the north side, and two planned estates of
terraces facing each other across the highway, bounded by Warwell
and Yew Tree Lanes. At Hay Mills north of Coventry Road the never-completed
Shipway estate of projected 'places' was now continued eastwards
by a new suburban growth. From the Quadrant (1890) the triangle
between the old lanes - Deakins and Holder Roads - and the main
road was neatly divided by four straight streets with girls' names.
These were completed during the 1900s: kerbside trees, front gardens,
elaborate porches and bays, were trimmings on what were still
basically Georgian terraces, stepped down the slope.
The rest of Church End Quarter was like much of Swanshurst,
very little altered and for the same reasons. Other than rail-served
Stechford, the area had poor communications and services. Church
Road was the most-developed axis (Schools 1909) and even that
had long empty stretches. The line of mansions on its east side,
the isolated ones about the Yew Tree, the group on the west side
of Station Road, the assorted villas on the Church Field summit,
were new: but all the buildings in the Quarter outside Stechford
totalled few more than the number found in that suburb.
From 1895 Yardley was a Rural District, identical in boundaries
to the ancient parish (by then divided into five parishes), and
it remained so until 1911: it had then seven parishes, fourteen
schools, a larger population than many county towns {nearly 60,000),
some extractive and manufacturing industries, and four decidedly
urban areas linked to the City by public transport. But in some
respects Yardley remained most rural. Its services had failed
to keep pace with the growth of population and the demand for
amenities. Piped water reached Acocks Green from Birmingham in
1890, and most built-up areas had taps and mains drainage by the
end of the nineteenth century: but many scattered dwellings were
still using backyard pumps and privies a decade later. Gas lighting
was provided in made-up streets and new houses, but there was
no electricity supply. Fire and refuse collection services were
inadequate, and there was no general hospital in Yardley. Roads
were narrow, hedged and ditched lanes, and many of those on slopes
were holloways with dangerous bends: even the well-made ones had
a surface of thick dust which rain soon turned to mud, and early
cars made life miserable for all other traffic and roadside dwellers.
There were fords and footbridges, such road bridges over streams
and canals as there were being narrow and humped.
Birmingham acquired in 1911 many thousands of its former citizens,
the well-built suburbs where they lived, and nearly 6,000 acres
of unbuilt land devoted to pastoral farming, market gardening,
allotments and open space - but also an immense task of modernisation.
The provision of better communications, and services, and of amenities
such as public baths and libraries, have continued to the present:
two world wars, and the depression midway between, plus the enormously
increased cost of everything, have prevented the completion of
many schemes devised even before 1914. The road and bridge programme
of the early 20th century, even if complete, would be inadequate
for present traffic: but it remains very largely at the stage
reached by 1939.
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