URBANISATION TO 1850-1900

Nearly seven acres more of the former Park were added nine years later. Aston Cross Tollgate was removed in 1862. A new pattern of streets was laid out across the south and east of the former Park in the 1850s. Park Road provided a new highway from Cross to Church, and Victoria Road marked a temporary line of advance. Behind these Vicarage, Sycamore, Queens, Pugh, Clifton, Tower and Whitehead Roads, Upper Sutton and Thomas Streets, were marked out and built on during the neat two decades.

Roads were intended to house middle class families in a select suburb that would rival Edgbaston and be very different from the streets of Lozells. Victoria Road's making (1857 on) had created Six Ways and provided a wide straight highway across half the manor, linking the freed turn-pikes. West of High Street the three farms were now obliterated by long straight streets, fourteen north-south and four transverse. In the 1880s the square about St. Silas's was built up, and development of Villa and Lozells was complete a decade later. Off-street 'groves' added to the district's overcrowding, as did uncontrolled conversions to industry. Furnace Lane survived as a right of way, flanked by the backyards of William and Porchester Streets.

By 1870 ribbon development had walled in the new main roads. New Town had spread up to Six Ways and what had been Burtons Wood was under attack. Witton, Albert, and Trinity Roads were the new high ways across the northern parkland. Aston Lower Grounds (31¼ acres) were opened to the public in 1872. They stretched from Holte Tavern to Witton Cross between Trinity Road and Witton Lane. About Dovehouse Pool there was an ornamental park, the rest of the site being used for exhibitions and fairs. After seven successful years (helped by the banning of Birmingham's pleasure fair in 1875), the proprietors of the Grounds built what would now be called a leisure centre. This towered and step-gabled complex in buff brick housed the great Holte Theatre for plays, concerts, and balls, an art gallery, menagerie, aquarium, restaurants, bars, elevated promenade and winter garden. Later attractions were a sports ground with cycle track and covered stands, a bowling green, and a large indoor skating rink.

A bridge led over Witton Road to Staffs. Pool, made into a boating lake. At Lower Grounds were held fairs, shows, sports gatherings, concerts, displays. These continued into the C20th on a much reduced site. Trains and trams brought the crowds. Aston Tavern was rebuilt in the 1880s to cater for them, and Holte Tavern in 1897. The cricket/football ground was sold for building a decade earlier. A football club which had been founded at Aston Villa Wesleyan Sunday School (then an adult body) played on a ground in Wellington Road, Perry Barr, from 1874 until 1896. The Company formed in the latter year leased seven acres of Lower Grounds, drained the Pool and built a stadium on its site, calling it Villa Park. Later the Club acquired the buildings alongside. After the closure of the Grounds the meadow beside Salford Reservoir was used as a fairground. The demesne meadows north of the manor house site, and Staffs. Pool, were drained and overbuilt from the later 1880s. Nelson, Jardine, and Endicott Roads covered the cricket pitch, and another on Rocky Lane was later obliterated by Dunlop buildings. Across the bed of Great Pool streets were laid out in the 1900s, but building thereon, as on Village Road, was not complete until after the First World War.

Urbanised Aston was a shut-in town of endless brick and slate cliffs. Whether infilled sporadically in the mid-1800s by cottage rows and florid post-Georgian houses, or by uniform tunnel-back terraces and overdressed villas during the next three decades, the end result was the same - unbroken facades for hundreds of yards, steadily blackening in the sooty atmosphere. Aston Villa's early streets had character: well-proportioned houses with Tudorish or baroque stone decoration, which happened to be crowded together but still had a rural air, were the homes of prosperous tradesmen and merchants from Birmingham.

The long terraces of the 1880s opened directly onto the street and were the plainer and meaner dwellings of artisans. Corner shops and alehouses served them. Along the 'roads' the villas were tall and pretentious with gothic or baroque clutter behind tiny front gardens. Lichfield and Lozells Roads, and Witton Road north end, were the main shopping streets. For the past century conversion of houses and in places their later replacement by purpose-built stores has been a continuing feature. From the 1890s four shopping, service, and amenity centres developed. At Villa Cross the inn was at the east end of Villa Road (Handsworth) shop rows.

About Six Ways and High Street were three churches, some large shops and banks, the huge Bartons Arms Hotel (1901) and Aston Hippodrome, Burlington Hall, the Liberal Unionist Club (1894), a post office, Victoria and Albert Halls 1886, 1899), the Council Offices and Library (1882). At Aston Cross were the new cast-iron clock-tower of 1891, the Royal Theatre (1893), Carnegie Library (1903), Golden Cross Hotel (1888, on site of 1820s Cross Tavern), the main post office (1890), York House (1904) and other stores, and the new Liberal Unionist Club of 1907.

At Witton Cross the Borough of Aston Manor Tramway Depot (1903), Aston Hotel and the Pavilion Theatre alongside (both 1910) were the chief buildings amid a clutter of small shops. The new or rebuilt pubs of Aston in sumptuous terra cotta and glazed brick contrasted with the dingy terraces they served. Surviving examples are Church Tavern (1897), Swanpool Tavern (formerly Station Inn, 1898), Britannia (1899), Aston Hotel (l910). The Holte Hotel of 1897 attempted to fit in architecturally with the Hall above: it replaced a three-storey late Georgian house-turned-tavern.