Georgian Times

Henry Beighton's 'Mapp of Warwickshire' was surveyed in 1722-5. Yardley is nearly islanded in his native county, so much can be learned from the boundary features he shows; also, the highways which cross Yardley are drawn, with their intersections. These can be matched with known lanes, so that if these are plotted and foredroves to known farms are added, a conjectural map of the early Georgian manor is produced. However, as there was probably little change in the landscape from then until early Victorian times, the known landscape of the latter period can be considered in detail in its place, while other C 18th topics are dealt with here.

The Birmingham to Edgehill Turnpike Trust was established in 1725, one of the first hereabout. Though the Trust was quick to set up tollgates (one at the top of Colebank Road opposite the new Charity School, with a cottage for the keeper alongside), it was less prompt in making real improvements to the road on which tolls were being levied. Across the gravel ridge, the highway was a rutted strip of morass as wide as the present dual carriageway at Robin Hood by winter's end, travellers having carried out the ancient obligation to tread out a new way beside the old when the latter was impassable. On the slope up from Greet Mill, Green Bank in later times, the road was a steep and narrow holloway that became a watercourse in rain. Parishioners still had to perform their statutory labour, but the Trust now provided surveyor / engineers. A narrow causeway was made on both approaches to the ford, which was later paved; the holloway was eventually infilled (probably in the 1770's when tolls were raised by a half) with hard-core, and a cambered strip of macadam road was made, of graded and rolled layers of broken stone, wide enough for two coaches to pass, with a ditch on each side, down the middle of the worn way elsewhere.

A causeway was also made to cross Spark Brook's marshy valley. More horses were drowned during Cole floods; the first wain bridge was built by the county in Regency times. Coaches went to Warwick and the capital along what for some decades was called the London road, a preferred way to the shiretown because Warwick Road was notoriously bad.

The name 'Stratford Road' came into use after the opening of the Avon Navigation, which made the town a river port. From 1745 three milestones showing the distance from the capital - 114 opposite Sparkhill Park, 113 at Cole Bank Gate. (Here 'bank' has the local meaning; it refers to the slope up from the river, not to the riverside) By the century's end five daily coaches sped along the improved turnpike to and from Birmingham, keeping strict time. The Bull's Head was not a stage for the change of horses, but a 'request' stop.

Coaches did not stop at tollgates (which were manned not by Trust employees, because they could not be trusted, but by men who had bought at auction the right to take tolls for a year); warned by the guard's horn, the keeper swung wide the gate and let the heavily-laden coach go through at speed, catching the shilling and sixpence flung to him. For necessary repairs there were blacksmiths' and wheelwrights' shops by the Colebank Gate. Footpads infested the turnpike. The worthy schoolmaster of Hall Green, Sam. Swinburne, was robbed near Greet Mill in broad daylight, and a horseman was brought down at Foremans Lane corner by a rope stretched across the road; one Jones a milliner was held up near The Mermaid; these are but three of many incidents recorded in Aris's Birmingham Gazette.

The pools of the Quarter had all been made by 1783. On Coldbath Brook there were four - Coldbath itself, Lady Mill Pool, Old or Great Pool, and Sarehole Mill Pool. Swanshurst Lady Pool (alias Grove or Moseley New Pool) had been dammed on the next brook to the south by one Henry Giles in or before 1758. All these were fishponds, whether serving mills or not; fish was a profitable crop, caught in nets, as well as a source of sport. Greet Mill Pool had been made by a weir across the river, and this was enlarged in 1775. There were two pools on the south bound which serviced, Colebrook Priory (Bates or Bach) Mill and Shirley Hall; and in 1783 the 7.5 acre pool of Titterford Mill was dug out of the Coleside meadow, with a long dam on the river side, and a leat from Chinn Brook.