Place Names

What's in a name - or a number ?

Objections by residents of part of Cateswell Road to the recent change in their postal district number reminds us that place-names still count for something in these computerised days. The hard fact is that Birmingham 11, arbitrarily called Sparkhill by the Post Office is lower down the social scale than Birmingham 28, known as Hall Green : and house prices reflect this.

It is fascinating for a student of urbanisation (the development of a district from country to town) to note how names come and go, survive and change. Originally there may have been only one name for a large unpeopled area : as it was settled and cleared, so other names - farms, fields, hamlets, villages, greens, lanes, watercourses, mills, inns - appeared. As long as the district remained rural, most of these survived, though subject to change, especially in the centuries before established spelling and the advent of maps. When urban development took place, an old name might be adopted for a new estate, fields and buildings might be remembered in street or inn names, or the old names might disappear from use though still shown on maps. What has happened in Hall Green ?

The oldest name hereabout is of course the Celtic Arden, applied loosely to the plateau on which Birmingham is built and its southern approaches. It was not a forest in the legal sense of a royal hunting preserve, but was a wild timbered region. The name meant 'steep woodland', which is applicable to the edges of the plateau, such as Liveridge Hill.

In what follows a date is given for the first record we have found : it should be remembered that this only proves the use of a name at that time, not that the name was then newly-created. Early documents are relatively scarce, and the topographical details in them are all too few. Domesday Book is the first record of many places, including Birmingham, which were already centuries old : we are fortunate in having an earlier reference.

This is a Charter of King Edgar dated AD 972, which confirms the grant of 'five households in Gyrdleahe' to the Abbey of Pershore. This was an estate which became Yardley : it lay between Shirley and Lea Hall, Sparkbrook and Kineton Green, covering 11.5 square miles. Yardley then was the first (Saxon) name for our district, and the original settlement may well have been made two hundred years or more earlier than the Charter. Of those five households were any nearer than the place we now think of as Yardley, four miles or so north along the Outer Circle ? Can we find any names applicable to Hall Green?

We can indeed for the Charter records the bounds of Gyrdleahe : in or close to B28, as the postal code demands it be called, there were bromhalas (broomy nooks - recalled in Broomhall), witan leahe (white clearing - Robin Hood Golf Course), colle (River Cole), and, between the last two, leommanningweg (the way of Leommann's folk).

Leommnann was a Saxon farmer, living somewhere on the dry, open ridge where his 'way' wound between valley heads, little knowing that one day it would be called A34 : the most likely spot is near the Bull's Head.

For the next identifiable sites we look to medieval documents in Birmingham Reference Library, Worcester Diocesan Records Office, and the Yardley parish chest.

Gruthurste (Gravel Wood - Moseley Golf Course) and Swaneshurste (Peasants' Wood), two patches of Arden where common rights of pasturing were jealously guarded, lay across the Cole : they were first written down in 1221. Nearer were Bromhale (Broom Hall) and (Fox) Hollies, both in 1275 tax rolls. In the late C13- early 14th returns we find Faucombe, Clodeshal, and Whateley, which were three closes probably named after their tenants, on the valley side between Stratford Road and Cole Bank Road. The Heathes, later to be the site of The Hamlet (1883-92), between Stratford Road and Fox Hollies Road, was a croft recorded in 1366. Six Wayes, the junction now lost beneath the Robin Hood traffic island, appears from 1382 onwards - sometimes called Sex Ways, but that due to shaky spelling rather than local customs.

Yardley boundary perambulation reports of 1495 and 1609 give us, close to the present city boundary with Shirley, ffinchalls, Radmore, and Conygre Croft. The closes named are today overlain by the houses of Acheson, Watwood and Stonor Roads. Steelfields lay just east of the 'bus terminus. Four Ways (1550) was the crossing of 'the highway to Henley' by the through-Yardley ridgeway, now called Highfield and Fox Hollies Roads : south therefrom there seems to have been no lasting district name except Robin Hood, adopted from an inn, which helps to explain why this large area remote from Hall Green should call itself by that name. If a more suitable one were desired, why not Baldwyn field (1588) for the area between Robin Hood Lane and Baldwins Lane (1540), or Oaklands after a C18th farm on Scribers Lane - not to mention Barton's Folly from the same period ?

Busmere, later Bushmore, appeared in 1550, and two relative latecomers (1562 in record though perhaps earlier in fact) were Hawe Green and Shartmore, which have made up for their tardy arrival by lasting much longer than most, as Hall Green and Shaftmoor. It may surprise many good consumer-units of B28 to learn that their district name is not taken from the Hall which older inhabitants will remember being demolished in 1936, but from one Hawe who lived in it in Tudor times. Strictly, only those who live within a stone's throw of the Church of the Ascension are residents of the ancient Hall Green, which was a common pasture thereabout before enclosure.

The C18th brought accurate surveying and records. Estate plans, Beighton's one-inch map of 1725 and many successors, not to mention advertisements and news items culled from Aris's Birmingham Gazette give us many names that are or have been familiar. Green Bank, Greet Mill Hill, Cole Bank, Cateswell, Paradise, Webb, Scriber, Barton, Robin Hood, Studland, Sandpits, Langley, are all house, farm or family names that are still to be seen on street signs. In Victorian times some mansions were built beside the narrow lanes of Swanshurst and Broomhall Quarters in Yardley, but these have gone, leaving no reminders of their presence, except for the gate pillars of Fox Hollies Hall, and no names.

The Great Western Railway established Hall Green as the focal name when its North Warwickshire line was opened in late 1907 with a station beside the Stratford Road. But the Diocese of Worcester confirmed it the following year when Marston Chapel was enparished : Hall Green Parish extended from the Nine Stiles Walk to Shirley, bounded on the west by the Cole and on the east by the Rural District (now the City) boundary. Hall Green Parade proudly announced its name at the north end (1913), and the tram route, moving on from its 1914 terminus at Four Ways to the boundary in 1928. still called its destination 'Hall Green' : the scene was set for the building of all those roads and houses with the desirable district name - and, in the early thirties, the desirable postal number.

Since the First World War there have been old names for new estates, and one interloper - Pitmaston. If builders gave fancy names to their developments. these have not lasted. The streets fitted into spaces between ancient lanes have names which defy any attempt to explain them : they were chosen for any reason but an historical or geographical one. What a pity it is that interesting field-names were not perpetuated, as they have been in other parts of the City more recently. Instead there are family names, places of origin, whims, names from everywhere and nowhere.

Of the old names, apart from modernised lanes, only Hall Green, Robin Hood and Fox Hollies survive. One regrets that Green Bank, Shaftmoor, Cole Bank, Broom Hall, Highfield and Radmore have gone out of use : but it is pointless to mourn for district names replaced by two digits, when our city's venerable and revealing name is itself to be identified in future by a single letter !