by Chris Peers

What is now the busy suburb of Little Boldmere looked very different before the developments of the nineteenth century, and in particular the coming of the railway in 1862. The evidence comes from various sources – Domesday Book, old property deeds, nineteenth century field names and early censuses – but it all tells the same story. Roger Lea, in “The Story of Sutton Coldfield”, sums it up in a series of maps showing probable land use in Sutton in 1086, 1320 and 1822. The area which is now Little Boldmere remained open common – or “outwood” as it was called – until the enclosures of the 1820s, part of a more or less continuous ring of common land which surrounded the inhabited and cultivated centres of Sutton, Little Sutton, New Hall and Wylde Green. From 1126 to 1528 it was part of Sutton Chase, the extensive hunting preserve which King Henry I gave to the Earls of Warwick, of which Sutton Park is the surviving remnant. The Borough Charter which made Sutton into a self-governing town, granted by Henry VIII in 1528 at the request of Bishop Vesey, abolished the hunting rights on the Chase and turned most of it into common land.

The local people were now allowed to graze their animals and gather wood there, but Little Boldmere remained uncultivated, and apparently uninhabited. This is not surprising, as although the area is better drained than the boggy land further north which gave rise to the name “Coldfield”, and gets more sun as most of it is on a south-facing slope, the sandy, gravelly soil was not suitable for growing crops without a great deal of improvement. The whole area probably looked much like parts of Sutton Park do today, comprising patches of scrub, gorse and rough pasture.

John Speed’s Warwickshire map of 1610 was the first to show it in any detail; here the nearest settlement to Boldmere is Maney, just over a mile to the north-east. (Erdington must have been about the same distance to the south, but for some reason is omitted from Speed’s map, although we know from Domesday Book that it had been there since before the Norman Conquest). The whole area between Maney and Aston, including Little Boldmere, is simply described as “Cofeld Wast” – the “Coldfield Waste” – surely one of the least appealing of place names.

Even as late as 1825 the Corn Rent Survey, which was carried out for the Enclosure Commission with the aim of converting the old tithes paid to the Church in corn into money payments, shows no houses or cultivated fields in Little Boldmere itself, apart from a few fields encroaching from Wylde Green across the flat ground along where the railway now runs, towards what are now Sunnybank Road Allotments. The rest was still open common, labelled with its old name of “the Coldfield”. The same year, however, saw the beginning of the process known as Enclosure, which saw the common land divided up into fields which were allocated to local landowners in proportion to their wealth, the richest of course receiving the lion’s share.

Of course, the fact that no one lived here does not necessarily mean that nothing ever happened. Boldmere Road is marked (though not named) on the 1825 Corn Rent map, and was probably already a busy thoroughfare, since it led directly from Erdington village to Powell’s Pool, which became a centre of industry after the stream was dammed to provide power for rolling mills in the 1730s. The Chester Road was once a drover’s road along which herds of cattle from North Wales were driven to markets in the south-east of England. According to K J Bonser in “The Drovers”, most of the herds probably took this route in order to avoid the tolls on Watling Street. This trade is documented from the eighteenth century, but probably began in the Middle Ages.

K J Williams in “A History of Boldmere” also mentions several notorious robberies which occurred in this area, although we do not know exactly where they took place. In 1729 John Johnson from London was murdered on the common. Edward Allport, who hung out at the “Boot and Shoe”, a disreputable joint described as “on the left hand side of the Chester Road, near to the village of Erdington”, was hanged for the crime on Gibbet Hill, the eminence behind where Hall’s Garden Centre is now. In 1742 Henry Hunt from Birmingham was held up by two highwaymen on the Chester Road.

Unfortunately, another episode mentioned by Williams turns out on closer examination not to be relevant to Little Boldmere after all. The historian William Hutton describes how in February 1783 he tried to climb a hill overlooking the Coldfield but blundered into a bog and had to retreat. Williams says that in mentioning the “Bowen Pool”, Hutton “also recorded the name of the pool from which Boldmere was eventually to take its name”. He must therefore have assumed that the hill was the one on which Saint Michael’s Church now stands. However, an examination of Hutton’s book shows beyond doubt that he is talking about the Bourne Pool at Loaches Banks, several miles away near Aldridge.

The name that eventually replaced the “Coldfield Waste”, Boldmere, is little better from an estate agent’s point of view. It comes from “bald moor”, or the “bare lake”, and is generally believed to refer to a pool somewhere on the Chester Road. This pool does not appear on most maps before the twentieth century, by which time it must already have been drained, so its exact location remains uncertain. The earliest written reference is in the 1841 Census, which refers to Baldmoor Lake, and to a Lake House on the Chester Road, presumably where Lakehouse Road is now. It seems that it was not until the Parish of St Michael’s Boldmere was formed in 1857 that the name really stuck (though it appears in its present form on the commemorative plaque from the foundation stone of the church, which was laid in 1856).

The 1841 census shows a small number of houses in the Baldmoor Lake area, occupied mainly by people with rural occupations such as agricultural labourers and gardeners. By this time most of the common had been enclosed by field boundaries and incorporated into large farms. It must have involved an enormous amount of work to bring such unpromising land under the plough and increase its fertility to the point where it was economic to grow crops, and this no doubt is what the agricultural labourers living at the lake were doing. It is thanks to them that today’s residents are able to grow such a wide variety of plants in their gardens and allotments.

But Little Boldmere did not remain rural for much longer. On the Valuation Map of 1856 the built-up area of Boldmere was still restricted to the northern end of Boldmere Road, where the main shopping centre is now, with all the land to the south being still fields. The smaller cluster of shops at the Chester Road end of Little Boldmere did not appear until the 1890s. The population of the entire parish of Saint Michael’s at the time the church was consecrated in 1857 was estimated at between 500 and 750. Opportunities for employment locally were limited and the district was not yet very appealing to commuters, as the only public transport was provided by horse drawn omnibuses which completed the journey to Birmingham in about an hour and twenty minutes.

But things changed dramatically in 1862 with the opening of the Birmingham to Sutton Coldfield railway, with two stations on the eastern edge of Boldmere at Chester Road and Wylde Green. A timetable from 1870 shows that by then there were 16 trains a day running in each direction between Sutton Coldfield and Birmingham. The journey from Chester Road station to Birmingham took 23 minutes, not much longer than it does today. From then onwards Little Boldmere began its new incarnation as a suburb of Birmingham, as new housing spread up Boldmere Road from the Chester Road end to join up with the existing centre.

References

K J Bonser, The Drovers, Macmillan, 1970

William Hutton, An History of Birmingham, Birmingham, 1783

Roger Lea, The Story of Sutton Coldfield, Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 2003

K J Williams, A History of Boldmere, Westwood Press, Sutton Coldfield, 1994