Spring Hill

B18 - Grid reference SP055874

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

This is a topographical name. A holy well, which was believed to have healing properties for eye problems, emerged near the present site of Spring Hill Library. It had disappeared by 1880; the 20th-century street, Holy Well Close is near the site.

Holy wells were often pre-Christian and may well be of Celtic origin. They were often dedicated to a goddess to whom people made offerings, which were thrown into the water. The Anglo-Saxon Christian church frequently rededicated the wells in the name of a female Christian saint. The water, which was believed to have curative properties, was used for baptisms. Indeed baptisms may have taken place in the well itself until the Reformation when the practice fell out of favour as superstitious. Springfield Street takes its name from a late-18th-century mansion of that name built by George Hollington Barker, a successful lawyer formerly of Old Square.

Spring Hill was on the Dudley Turnpike of 1761 which left Birmingham from New Street then followed a circuitous route round the Easy Hill estate down to Sandpits, and up Spring Hill to the present Dudley Road. In the early 1770s a new straighter route was made along Summer Row. Tollgates stood at the junction of Spring Hill and Icknield Street on the site of the library, at Rotton Park Road and on Smethwick High Street at Stoney Lane where the tollhouse of 1818 survives. As ever William Hutton had a comment to make:

The road to Dudley, ten miles, is despicable beyond description. The unwilling traveller is obliged to go two miles about, through a bad road, to avoid a worse.

The district was heavily built up with poor quality housing during the last quarter of the 19th century. Steward Street Board School was one of the first five schools opened by the Birmingham School Board in 1873 and only one of two remaining. It had accommodation for 1036 children. Such was the poverty of the area that fees were halved to one penny a week in 1889, at which time nearly half the children were taught free and almost all the rest were in arrears. In 1914 an experimental open-air classroom was built in the playground. The school closed in 1969 and the building is now used commercially. Note the encaustic tiles above the door in the entrance arch.

Spring Hill Library, St Peter's Church in the background, Straight ahead is the Dudley Road, to the right is Icknield Street.

Take a look. Spring Hill Library designed by the Birmingham architects Martin & Chamberlain in 1893 is built in red-brick and terracotta in elaborate Victorian gothic and is Grade II* Listed. There is a tall clock tower, good detailed red terracotta work including prominent city coats-of-arms in relief, many beasts and curly bits. It is a fine example of a Victorian Birmingham public building standing rather solitary since the area was developed in the late 1960s.

Also looking out of place is on George Street West is the church of St Peter, a large brick building with stone dressings and a west tower by Birmingham architect F B Osborn in a rather pointed perpendicular style, consecrated 1902. These buildings are the only physical evidence of a Victorian past.

The poor housing of whole area was demolished and rebuilt during the 1960s. Some of that rebuilding did not stand the test of time and was again rebuilt at the end of the 20th century.

William Dargue 07.03.09

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