Turnpike Roads

Birmingham's manufactures were dependent on supplies imported from south Staffordshire and farther afield. The town was twenty miles from the nearest navigab-le river : from and to Bewdley, Stratford, and Burton-on-Trent, every hundredweight of materials or finished wares had to be transported by packhorse, for the abominable roads rarely permitted the use of wagons. Relative1y firm pebble-beds north-west of Birmingham were crossable in most seasons, but the variably-capped clay-lands and marshy valleys to east and south were always difficult and often impassable. Despite the need for better communications, roads were not improved at all until the C18 hereabout.

The first Turnpike Trusts were set up for the Walsall, Wednesbury, Bromsgrove, Stratford, and Warwick Roads in 1725 - 6. The Halesowen Road was so narrow, twisting, and roundabout, that it was abandoned. Grindlestone Lane (Hagley Road) was adopted as part of a turnpike in 1753, with tollgates at Five Ways and the Two-Mile Stump (the junction with Smethwick Lane, now Sandon Road). Dudley Road was turnpiked in 1760, and a second Act was obtained seven years later, which permitted some re-routing and the raising of tolls by a half to pay for improvements. The Birmingham tollgate was at Sandpits, the keeper's cot-tage being at the Icknield Street corner where the library now stands.

An entirely new Bromsgrove Road was cut from Exeter Row (Bristol Street) to join the old road (which was thereafter abandoned across Edgbaston Park) at Bourn Brook, in 1771. A tollgate was placed at the Edgbaston Lane crossing, and a tollbar (a point manned only on market days) at the Toy Lane junction to catch those who tried to avoid payment by taking the old road over the dam. Pershore Road, a rival and parallel highway, was not made until the 1820's, when it too had a tollgate on Edgbaston Lane.

Although the Trusts provided capital and engineers, they still relied for labour on the parishioners along the roads. These gave their six 'statutory days' grudgingly and worked poorly : the Hagley Trustees whose minutes record this were not alone in their troubles. In 1781 William Hutton described their turnpike as being 'che-quered with good and evil, chiefly the latter'.

27.1. Map 8

Of Dudley Road 'greatly used for the carriage of iron goods, coal, and lime' he wrote that it was 'despicable be-yond description'. The traveller is obliged to go two miles about, through a bad road, to avoid a worse'. Because these travellers used the track now called Rotton Park Road to avoid paying toll, a bar was set up at its junction with Dudley Road.

After 1792 lslington (Broad Street) was re-aligned between the Brasshouse and Bishopsgate Street. The road-making methods of Macadam which involved starting again on proper foundations and so often provided the opportunity to straighten or bypass bad stretches, were gradually adopted. Better roads made possible the in-troduction of light, narrow-wheeled coaches, which gave fast and punctual service along the turnpikes : their heyday was the first three decades of the C19th. Though locally subject to competition from canal fly-boats, they could still flourish on our highways until the railways came.