THE LIVERPOOL MAIL, 1836. From a Print after J. Pollard.
Returning to Stonebridge, the road to Coleshill, and to Castle Bromwich and Lichfield will be seen branching off from the Holyhead Road. Here, until the middle of the eighteenth century, the traffic for Shrewsbury and Chester commonly turned off. After that date, not only were the roads through Birmingham and Wolverhampton improved, but the places themselves grew into greater importance, and the old Chester Road, by consequence, decayed. By 1802 all the Chester coaches had deserted it, but the Liverpool Mail came this way until the last. Up to 1761 this was not the way to Coleshill at all. Until that year the road branched off at a point half a mile from Meriden, and lay through Packington Park. It was a straight and flat road, and convenient for Coleshill, but offensive to Sir Clement Fisher, who then was the squire at Packington Hall. It passed within sight of his windows, and he relaxed no effort until an Act of Parliament was passed, stopping it up, and making the present hilly and circuitous road in its stead. The preamble of the Act, stating that the old road was inconvenient and dangerous, is one of the most audacious falsehoods ever publicly stated. The old road can still be traced in the Park, and standing beside it is an old tombstone, recording the fate of a London tailor struck by lightning when travelling this way.
XLVII
But enough of Packington. Let us on to Birmingham, now but nine miles distant, by Elmdon, Wells Green, and Yardley.
Elmdon, were it not for that pretty roadside timber-framed inn, the ‘Cock,’ would be but a name and nothing else, so far as the road could show. Passing it, bid a long farewell, O traveller along the Holyhead Road, to the country, for in less than another two miles Wells Green is reached and Birmingham within hail. Thereafter, in nothing less than eighteen miles shall you see the hedgerows, the fields, and the quiet road again. Birmingham and the Black Country intervene, and not until, having gained and overpassed Wolverhampton, you ascend the heights of Tettenhall, will the sun be seen shining in a clear sky once more. Meanwhile, here is Wells Green, the last approach to the likeness of the country on this side of Birmingham, and by consequence a place of great half-holiday and Sunday resort. Midland cyclists are its chief patrons. For them the “Old Original” tea-house caters, for their custom also the “Ship,” the “Lighthouse,” and many more compete frantically among each other, attracting attention by large and elaborate models of ships, lighthouses, and other objects displayed beside the road. The two old roadside inns—the “Wheatsheaf” and the “Crown”—have been ornately rebuilt; the “Crown” vulgarly.
Beyond Wells Green the road enters an outlying portion of Worcestershire and comes to Yardley, a new-built Birmingham suburb, whose shops, dotted here and there by the wayside, alternate with barns, cow-houses and hedges, presently to give place to suburban streets and so provide those shops with customers. In the hollow succeeding Yardley, at Hay Mills, where a little stream runs, not yet completely polluted and decently buried from sight in a drain pipe, the mile’s length of Worcestershire ends. Hay Mills now belies its idyllic name, for it is here that modern Birmingham definitely begins, and the smoke-cloud and traffic of that great city grow in density.
Small Heath, Bordesley, Deritend, and Digbeth, that are all comprised in the next two and a half miles, are now but the various names distinguishing what would otherwise be one long street, growing gradually more grimy and crowded : a hilly street, where hideous steam tramways, belching smoke and smuts, run noisily, like armoured trains, and where the few old gabled cottages that are left, to tell of times when this was a country road, are closely beset by modern houses, already hung with soot, like the cobwebs on bottles of old port. A dramatic change indeed from what Leland saw, when he journeyed to Birmingham in 1538, and came “through as pretty a street as ever I entred, into Bermingham towne. This street, as I remember, is called Dirtey.” He meant Deritend, which, if called “Dirtey” to-day would by no means be libelled. “Dirty End” would be an easy change from the real name of the squalid street, and equally descriptive of it.
Wigstead in 1797 tells a tale very different from that of Leland. Instead of a “pretty street,” he found an entrance “by no means prepossessing the traveller in its favour—a confused mass of brick and tile rubbish piled together.” Birmingham he thought to be an objectionable place. “Enveloped in an almost impenetrable smoky atmosphere,” he says, “it is by no means an agreeable object to a picturesque eye.”
END OF VOL. 1