BOUNDARIES
| In this essay sites will be identified by reference to modern streets.
This is for ease of location: it should not be assumed that the streets
named were in existence at the period under scrutiny. A perambulation
of the 1½ mile common boundary of Bordesley and Deritend would
be impossible today without a helicopter. From the Rea at Montagu
Street's north end it curves south-south-east to Great Barr Street,
south-south-west towards and then down the west side of Glover Street,
parallels Adderley Street's north side, follows the line of a lost
alley off the south side of High Street into and down Alcester Street
and Vaughton Street to the Rea again. On a building opposite the alley
adjacent signs 'High Street Deritend' and 'High Street Bordesley'
used to indicate the boundary, but only the latter survives. The salient
towards Glover Street, the north side of which follows Bordesley Brook,
is not now explicable, but may have been an inroad into forest already
made when the bounds were agreed.
The south bound of Bordesley from the Rea to New Bridge was also Warwickshire's until the Greater Birmingham Act, for the neighbour manors of Kings Norton and Yardley were in Worcestershire. An odd consequence of this was the changing role of a small stream which has largely vanished from view, in its time Spark Brook has separated two peoples - Angles and West Saxons; two kingdoms, Mercian and Hwiccan; two Sees, Lichfield and Worcester; two shires; two Domesday manors, Estone and Gerlei (Aston and Yardley), later Bordesley and Greet manors; two parishes, Sts. Peter & Paul Aston and St. Edburgh Yardley; two Civil Parish ends, Bordesley and Greet; the two sides in the Civil War; Bordesley Ward of the Borough of Birmingham and Yardley Civil Parish of the Solihull Union; wards and constituencies of Birmingham and Yardley Rural District, later of the City of Birmingham; and two postal districts, B12 and B11. From Vaughton's Hole (west end of Vaughton Street) Bordesley's south bound followed the Rea upstream to and up a tributary mill, 'Belgrave Brook' (no surviving name), which ran between Belgrave Road and Highgate Street. From Moseley Road the bound lay along Highgate Road's north side: from a point about a hundred yards east of Turner Street it ran north of and parallel to Highgate Road, and along a hedge-line from Ladypool Road to Stoney Lane. Therefrom it followed Spark Brook, across Stratford Road, between Benton and Walford Roads, to and down the River Cole to New Bridge on Yardley Green Road. The brook is visible eastwards from Golden Hillock Road to the Cole confluence only. From the bridge Bordesley marched with Little Bromwich along Yardley Green Road, Blake Lane, Bordesley Green, and Wash Brook to its source near Humpage Road: and therefrom with Saltley along a line north of and roughly parallel to Garrison Lane to the Rea near Landor Street Bridge. From about Venetia Road downhill the bound followed a lost rill, 'Garrison Brook': east of its source an odd salient into Saltley beside Garrison Farm may be explicable geologically (see below). Bordesley covered 1880 acres, nearly three square miles.
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