Blabbs/ The Blabbs

B75 - Grid reference SP128959

Use the grid reference on the Ordnance Survey website - Get-a-map.

Recorded on the Greenwoods' map of 1821 as the Blob and in 1841 as Blabs, The Blabbs was hamlet at Broomie Close off Coleshill Road at the foot of Reddicap Hill. It lay either side of a small tributary of Plantsbrook which flows under the road here. The 1889 Ordnance Survey map shows what appears to be a higgledy-piggledy collection of houses and gardens here in a rural area about a mile from the centre of Sutton Coldfield. This was an agricultural community. The 1861 Census lists the households of 8 agricultural labourers as well as a groom and a laundress. There was also one James Irving from Scotland, a farm bailiff, who very likely managed a nearby farm for the landowner. Robert Knattress aged 60 from Nottinghamshire also lived here. He was employed as a gas labourer at Sutton gas works which stood at the junction of Coleshill Road and Riland Road. This is now Norris Way, a 20th-century industrial estate.

The placename is unexplained. ‘Blab' is a medieval word meaning, as it does now, ‘to say too much'. It is possibly an onomatopoeic word describing the noise of the steam here.

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For 19th-century Ordnance Survey maps of Birmingham go to British History Online - Maps.