URBANISATION 1848 - 1915

The newly empowered Corporation removed the tollgates in 1851. On C.H. Blood's map of 1855 some of the Lloyd estate streets - Henley, Kendal, Sampson, Braithwaite - were plotted but not yet developed. 'Farm' was much-enlarged two years later. From 1866 the Borough Surveyor's maps show the progress of street-making, but not of building which tended to be piecemeal and sporadic. A more useful guide to a street's state of development is the date given for its adoption by the Borough, as given in the Corporation's History. The Simcox, Larches, and White House estates were largely overbuilt in the 1870s. The James Lloyd Almshouses were erected on Belgrave Road in 1869. By then the outbuildings of the Old Crown were derelict: they were demolished and brick Tudorish extensions were made.

The timbered first floor of the mansion had long since been underpinned with brick. Deritend's street-pattern was then complete except for a small area east of Stanhope Street: this was probably a claypit, soon to be filled with industrial waste. Similar lack of development south of St. Andrew's Church was certainly due to quarrying. The brick and macadam tide had elsewhere reached the Gloucester Extension Line, was advancing rapidly east from Herbert Road and Kelynge Street (Tilton Road) as far as Muntz/ Victoria Streets, and had practically filled the angle between Stratford and Highgate Roads. This was all terrace building, with much infilling with courts of the blocks between streets.

The maximum number of small dwellings was crowded into every space, except for the Green Lanes, where earlier scattered villas had not yet been absorbed into rows. Villa lines, tunnelbacks with short front gardens, were spreading along the freed turnpikes, and there were 'cottages' on Yardley Green Road. Bordesley Green developed as a dwelling and amenity centre from 1875. Short streets off Garrison Lane stopped short at the Borough/Saltley boundary. Deritend was wholly built up by 1884, all mansions swept away and replaced by terrace dwellings or converted to workshops. Factories large and small were proliferating, linked by horse-wagon to canal and railway wharves.

The quadrilateral Coventry/Bolton/Golden Hillock Roads was overlain by long straight streets of end1ess terraces approaching a formerly-detached estate of villas about Wordsworth Road. A mansion opposite 'Farm' had become St. Martin's Rectory. The completed Lloyd streets extended across the grounds of Sparkbrook House, now demolished, and some crofts of Anderton's (Green Stile) Farm: the farm buildings (site at the corner of Anderton and Fallows Roads) were razed a decade later, and the Barber Estate began its distinctive develop-ment southward. On and beside Armoury Road the Birmingham Small Arms Company built terraces for key work-people. In 1884 there was a proposal to bridge the canal and railway which separated Small Heath and Sparkbrook, but Small Heath Bridge was not opened until 1904. The Rea had been confined in a deep brick culvert by 18 93. Thenceforward it was little more than a storm drain bordered and even spanned by factories.

There is a marked contrast between urbanisation up to the 1880s, by which time so much of Bordesley (the district, not the whole manor), Highgate, Sparkbrook, and Small Heath had been developed, and that which followed. Short streets whose pattern is explicable only as piecemeal building on small plots of land in different ownerships contrast with long straight wide streets parallel to each other, having few intersections and those at or near right angles, laid out across whole farms. Infilling is different too: where in the earlier blocks were jumbles of mean dwellings separated by walls, yards, tunnels, and alleys with no regularity and the minimum of open space, now all was uniformity.

Endless lines of identical tunnelbacks with long narrow back gardens and small front ones for the taller and more pretentious, created better living but dreary vistas. The new century saw houses becoming wider and lower, woodwork breaking up flat frontages with bays and porches: large front gardens and kerbside trees improved the look of the long straight roads. Spark Brook was culverted in the 1890s, and the Barber Estate spread across it into Yardley Rural District. Charles Hougham was building over the Digby Estate between 1890 and 1915: streets named after Digbys were surveyed and built up in a steady eastward advance along the north side of Coventry Road. Then the East Birmingham Town Plan was approved: a ring road was to be made from Heybarnes to Alum Rock, bordered by riverside open space. Private development stopped on Monica Road, and when building was resumed in the 1920s it was municipal.

Meanwhile Rowton House had been opened beside Highgate Park, and two blocks of flats in Palmer Street, both 1903, and 'Bill' had built his house at 146 Bordesley Green five years later. The adoption of new streets and the improvement of old ones had gone steadily on: there were new bridges over the Cole and Warwick Canal (1903 and 04), Highgate Road had been widened and lowered beneath the railway bridge, and a short street had linked Victoria and Muntz Streets. These works were in preparation for a proposed circular tramcar route which was never made.

In 1911 the Golden Lion was removed to Cannon Hill Park. Amenity centres before World War I, places where churches , halls, large pubs, and shops clustered, were Deritend /Bordesley High Street, Coventry/Cattell Road corner to Green Lanes junction, Watery/Garrison Lanes junction, Coventry Road from Muntz Street to Charles Road, Camp Hill, opposite Highgate Park, Highgate, Bordesley Green, Green Lane: and there were smaller shop rows elsewhere.