A few houses of the framed timber and plaster construction common in the 17th century, remain in Digbeth, and one of a very interesting kind was this year removed from the corner of Bull Street. The earliest in date is the Old Crown House, which is probably of the first half of the 16th century. This was a very interesting specimen of the more massively constructed, but simpler kind, with gables at the extremities of the front, and a central porch of two stories; but the whole of the ground floor was reconstructed about twenty years ago, and it has recently been further disfigured by painting and graining. At Camp Hill there is a very fine half-timbered house in good preservation. This has the date 1601 cut on the porch. Most of the houses burnt by Prince Rupert, when he sacked the town in 1643, were probably of the half-timbered kind, since several still remain.
St. Philip’s Church.—From this time there is nothing to mark the architectural progress of the town until the important event of the making by Act of Parliament, passed in 1711, of a new parish of St. Philip in Birmingham. This was immediately followed by the building of the Church of St. Philip, a remarkably good example of the School of English Renaissance founded by Wren and continued by his pupils, of whom the architect of this Church, Thomas Archer, was one of the most successful. The first stone of the Church was laid in 1711, and it was consecrated in 1715. It is a large building, the area divided into nave and aisles by square, fluted pillars, carrying semicircular arches, and supporting galleries which extend over the aisles. With the exception of the steeple, the whole has been restored, and within the last year the chancel, which was but a shallow recess, has been lengthened by one bay. The fine east window by Mr. Burne Jones, a native of Birmingham, is considered to be one of his most successful works.
The building of the Church was soon followed by the erection of rows of houses of an uniform character on the north and south sides of the churchyard. These have nearly all disappeared: they were built of brick in the good domestic style of the early part of the last century, with picturesque doorways, with curved and broken pediments, balustraded parapets, and heavy white sashes with broad moulded frames. The interiors had fine oak staircases with turned and twisted balusters, and were good examples of the cheery home-like dwellings of their time. Other buildings, forming “The Old Square,” of a somewhat similar character, have lately been pulled down to make way for a new street, and very little that is even as old as the “Georges” will be left us after a very short time.
The Town Hall.—The building of the Town Hall, begun in 1832, was the first great local architectural event of the present century. It was designed by Messrs. Hansom & Welch, architects, of Liverpool, in professed imitation of the Corinthian Temple of Jupiter Stator at Rome, but it falls far below its prototype in the scale and richness of the “order.” To properly adapt a temple of the Romans to the various wants and requirements of a Town Hall for the people of Birmingham required considerable inventive skill, and to obtain the required height the temple was mounted on a lofty rusticated basement. The grand flights of steps to the colonnades, which add so much dignity to the Greek and Roman temples, are here accessible only by means of a ladder. It is nevertheless a noble building, of Anglesey marble, though what we admire in the exterior is due to the ancient architect, and not to the adapters. The interior is well suited to its many and varied uses, but the entrances are narrow and undignified, and the lobbies insufficient.
The Free Grammar School, or King Edward’s School, was founded on the property belonging to the Gild of the Holy Cross, taken possession of by Henry VIII., and restored to the town by Edward VI. in the shape of an educational endowment. The old hall used by the Gild stood on the site of the present school, and it is probable that it was used as a school until new buildings were erected in 1707. Of that edifice drawings are in existence, which show it to have been of two storeys, and forming three sides of a quadrangle, with a tower over the central and chief entrance, terminated by a cupola. The buildings were of brick, with stone dressings; the windows square-headed, of the heavy-sashed description used in the domestic architecture of the time. A high balustraded parapet hid the roofs from sight.
The School was pulled down in 1832, and the present noble building erected on its site. The style is that of the latter half of the fifteenth century, commonly called Tudor, and although erected so soon after the revival of Gothic architecture, it has scarcely been excelled for boldness and propriety of design or for purity of detail. It forms on plan a nearly equal-sided square. The chief front, facing New Street, has slightly projecting wings, in which are fine Oriel windows, of two stories, the intermediate length being divided by boldly projecting buttresses, terminated by crocketed pinnacles, into nine bays of two stories in height. The entrance is in the middle bay, through a handsome moulded and carved doorway, to a vestibule finely groined in stone. The upper floor of the central part of the front is now occupied by the Girls’ School, and is lighted by grand traceried and transomed windows of three lights. The south front, looking towards the railway station, contains the Boys’ School, and is of a simpler, but quite as good a design as the main elevation. The two principal schoolrooms are very fine, with open timber roofs. The architect was Sir Charles Barry, and a striking similarity between the details of this building and of those of the Houses of Parliament of about this time may be observed.
Christ Church.—Christ Church, consecrated in 1813, stands at the junction of New Street with Ann Street, and occupies the most prominent and the best position in the town, but is quite unworthy of its site. It is in the quasi-Classic style prevailing in the time of George III., with a lofty but ill-proportioned tower and spire, and a western portico of the Roman Doric order.
St. Peter’s.—Several of the churches succeeding the last were built by the well known Thomas Rickman; among these were St. Peter’s in Dale End, a heavy, uninteresting building, with a Grecian Doric portico, surmounted by a “Temple-of-the-Winds”-like structure as a steeple.
St. Thomas’s.—St. Thomas’s, at Holloway Head, another of Rickman’s, is designed in the same spirit, but with details of the Ionic order. Some of the earliest efforts of the revival of Gothic architecture were made here by Rickman, the most important of which,
St. George’s, a large perpendicular structure, is for its time fairly good, but the details are thin and wiry.