City Road

Rotton Park Read is medieval in origin if not much earlier. Portland Road was cut across the Park about 1870. But the principal highway, which goes in a dead straight line for 1½ miles from the southern to the northern boundary of Rotton Park was not started until the year when the Borough of Birmingham was made a City - 1889. It is fitting that this noble thoroughfare, the longest end-to-end straight street in Birmingham, should commemorate the honour. City Road was adopted in '91, the year when Sir James Smith then tenant of Edgbaston Hall was created Birmingham's first Lord Mayor.

It was one of the first streets to be planted with trees, which now are large enough to cause pavement prob-lems : and one day it may be a dual carriageway, with Portland School alongside it, no longer hidden by the houses that were rebuilt after the land-mine explosion of '43. The alignment of City Road was governed by the position of Summerfield Park and Cavendish Road on either side : its making brought the demolition of Birmingham Heath Farm beside the Park, only Summerfield Cottage surviving of a group of buildings thereabout.

Bellefield was razed soon afterwards, and development to the boundary was completed within a few years. The populous suburb of terraces and villas was catered for by purpose-built shop rows and ever-increasing conversions along Dudley Road and Winson Green Road. Nettlefolds' Screw Works and Cape Hill Brewery, just over the Smethwick boundary were the nearest industrial complexes on that side : Summerfield Park and the Reservoir formed a barrier beyond which the factories of Ladywood did not spread.

48.1. Map 12