Fair Hill

History

The happiest event

Joseph Priestley arrived in Birmingham in 1780 already famous. He had isolated “dephlogisticated air”, the gas we call oxygen, in 1774, and he had invented soda water. Those discoveries were made elsewhere. What Birmingham offered him was company.

He came, he said, because his brother-in-law, the ironmaster John Wilkinson, “wished to have us nearer to him” and “soon provided a house for me”. That house was Fair Hill, in Sparkbrook, then outside the town. Within a few months Priestley was minister at the New Meeting in Moor Street, on condition that he preached only on Sundays, leaving the rest of the week for writing and experiments. In his memoirs, written at Birmingham in 1787, he described his “settlement at Birmingham as the happiest event in my life”.

Science on subscription

Fair Hill had a laboratory, and Priestley filled it. His New Meeting salary was modest, so his experiments were paid for by friends. He recorded that Samuel Galton and his son took up a subscription, and that Josiah Wedgwood “was very zealous to serve me, and urged me to accept of a much larger allowance than I chose”. He valued Birmingham for “the convenience of good workmen of every kind” and for friends “eminent for their knowledge of chemistry”.

Those friends were the Lunar Society. Priestley named them: Watt, Keir, Withering, Boulton, Darwin, Galton and others, who “dined together every month”. The sources we have checked do not confirm that the Society met at Fair Hill, but its members certainly knew the house. Here Priestley went on with his work on “airs”, sent papers to the Royal Society, and defended the old theory of phlogiston against Lavoisier’s new chemistry. He also wrote a stream of theology, and backed reform. That made him a target.

14 July 1791

On 14 July 1791 a dinner was held at a hotel in Temple Row to celebrate the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Priestley did not go. A crowd gathered outside, attacked the departing guests, then burned the New Meeting and the Old Meeting. Then it headed out to Sparkbrook.

Priestley and his wife Mary escaped. His son William and others stayed behind but could not stop the house and laboratory being ransacked and burnt that evening. His books, papers and scientific apparatus were destroyed. An eyewitness letter quoted by Revolutionary Players describes the road “for half a mile ... strewn with your books” and the floor “covered, two or three inches deep with torn leaves, chiefly manuscript”.

The rioting spread for days, to Easy Hill, Edgbaston Hall and the homes of other Dissenters, until troops restored order. Priestley went to London and never returned to Birmingham. In 1794 he emigrated to Pennsylvania, where he died in 1804.

The Larches

The estate did not stay empty. According to the Galton family papers used by Karl Pearson in 1914, after the riots “nothing was left but one room and the laboratory over the stables”. The house was rebuilt and renamed The Larches. In 1799 William Withering, Priestley’s Lunar colleague, bought it. He moved in on 28 September 1799 and died there on 6 October.

The Larches later became a Galton home. Francis Galton, Samuel Galton’s grandson and Erasmus Darwin’s grandson, was born there on 16 February 1822. Three Lunar families, one patch of ground.

The Larches was demolished around 1871. Terraced streets were laid out over the estate, and they were already built when the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1888–1913. Priestley Road and Larches Street keep the names, and, according to local historian William Dargue, Erasmus Road follows the line of the old drive. The area was rebuilt again in the 1960s. A stone tablet is reported on the side of No. 10 Priestley Road.

The mob burnt Priestley’s papers, but not his ideas. They outlived the riot, the house and the town that drove him out.

What happened here?

Priestley lived and experimented here from 1780 to 1791, funded by Lunar friends. Rioters ransacked and burnt the house and laboratory on 14 July 1791. Rebuilt as The Larches, it was bought by William Withering, who died here in 1799, and later became the Galton family home where Francis Galton was born in 1822. It was demolished around 1871.

Why it disappeared

Riot · Redevelopment

On the evening of 14 July 1791 rioters ransacked and set fire to the house, destroying Priestley’s books, papers and apparatus (Revolutionary Players). The rebuilt house, The Larches, was demolished around 1871 (Dargue) and the estate was built over with terraced streets, rebuilt again in the 1960s.