TURNPIKES AND CANALS

The road between the great cathedrals of Worcester and Lichfield, a part-Roman way called 'one of the four great roads of England' in medieval times, went through Aston. Roads from Birmingham to Walsall and Wednesbury bracketed Lozells Wood. Being wholly unmade and grudgingly mended, they were directions of difficult travel rather than highways. As Birmingham's importance as a market and manufac-turing town grew, so the wear on approach roads increased. In Aston, bedded on sandstone beneath gravelly drift, they were less subject to boggy impassibility than were the clay ways of Arden to the south, but steep holloways were worn into every slope and the uneven roadbeds were in places too narrow for waggons to pass each other.

These obstacles to trade and travel led to the setting-up in 1726 of Turnpike Trusts for five of the main routes out of the town, including the Wednesbury and (Old) Walsall Roads. The latter went by way of Soho Hill and Hamstead Road: a tollgate and house were erected at the Hamstead Road/Villa Road junction. (The present building on the site is still called Tollgate House). For half a century there was no great improvement in the state of the roads, which were merely levelled and ditched. But then, under threat from canal flyboat services, the Trusts began to improve their turnpikes: re-alignment, grading, and proper road-making on MacAdam's principles were undertaken.

Travel along the Lichfield Road was hindered by the ford on Aston Brook. There was no bridge until the County built one in 1792, fifteen years before the route was turnpiked. The road was then much improved: tollgates were set up at Aston Cross and Cuckoo Lane. The New Walsall Turnpike was made in the heyday of the fast, light stage-coach, 1830, along Newtown Row and Birchfield Road. Now Aston had good communications with the ever-growing town. Within a few decades the formerly frequent coaches had been supplanted by penny-a-mile fast trains.

In 1790 the completion of a brick-and-stone aqueduct across the Tame alongside Salford Bridges brought the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal into operation. Aston now had access by water to the Coventry Canal at Fazeley and thereon to the Trent & Mersey, the Oxford Canal, and the Thames. Through Birmingham there were links with the Mersey and the Severn. The Fazeley cut came from Cambrian Wharf on the then western edge of the town, descending 151 feet by way of 13 locks to Aston Road and 11 locks to Salford on the manor side of the Bourn valley.

A feeder near Wharf Street tapped the brook. Each of the single-gated narrow locks has a side-pond so that boats may pass, and excess water falls over semi-circular weirs to the pounds below. Two Wharf Streets in Aston (the northmost now called Jameson Street) indicate access to unloading points where the earthen bank was strengthened with timber piles. Because of the lockage into the Tame valley, it is unlikely that flyboats operated on the Aston part of the Fazeley Canal.

The brook was prone to flood and its valley was undrained, so for the first eighty years of the canal's use factory and warehouse building was confined to its west side. Water traffic increased in the mid l840s despite the opening of the Midland Railway, because the new Tame Valley Canal and the Birmingham & Warwick Junction Canal (neither in Aston) bypassed the congestion of the town cuts, and brought Black Country coal and iron to Aston, Ashted, and Digbeth factories, and there was a steady trade with London via the Warwick Canal. Windsor Street Gasworks in Duddeston was to be fed by the Fazeley cut from the '50s. Three short branches were later made across Aston Brook north of Holborn Hill to what was incorrectly called Bloomsbury Wharf (Bloomsbury was a Duddeston housing development), to distinguish it from Aston Wharf on Lichfield Road.

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