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Kingstanding Together

Transport (station, canal, road, tram) · City centre · c. 1960

Holloway Circus

The south-western corner of the Inner Ring Road, where Smallbrook Ringway began. Kenneth Budd’s 85-foot mosaic of the old Horse Fair was unveiled in its underpass in 1966; a pagoda now stands on the island.

SurvivingSurviving but altered
View from a grassy roundabout along a dual carriageway lined with new office blocks and a tall hotel, with traffic in the distance.
1963. John Ball, via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

What was here?

A roundabout at the Horse Fair end of the first stretch of ring road, with the A38 later passing beneath in an underpass.

History

The first section of the ring road, opened on 11 March 1960, ran from Horse Fair at Holloway Circus to Queen’s Drive. In 1963 John Ball photographed Smallbrook Ringway running east from the circus.

On 30 June 1966 the Lord Mayor, Alderman H. E. Tyler, unveiled a mosaic mural on the north wall of the underpass. Designed and made by Kenneth Budd from a painting by L. A. Howles of the City Architect’s Department, it is 85 feet long and shows the old Horse Fair, which the council had stopped in 1911. It cost £8,000.

Why it mattered

Holloway Circus marked the start of the whole project and still works much as it was designed.

The same spot, then and now

Ordnance Survey map of 1888–1913 around Holloway Circus

1888–1913

Today’s streets around Holloway Circus

Today

Explore it on the full map
Old map: Ordnance Survey six-inch, reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland (CC BY 4.0). Today: © OpenStreetMap contributors.

What’s there now

What survives

The roundabout and the A38 underpass.

Today

A busy roundabout with a Chinese pagoda on its central island.

Then and now

Then · 1963

View from a grassy roundabout along a dual carriageway lined with new office blocks and a tall hotel, with traffic in the distance.
Looking east along Smallbrook Ringway from Holloway Circus — 1963. John Ball, via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Now · 27 October 2005

A large roundabout with a Chinese pagoda on its central island.
Holloway Circus — Graham Taylor, 27 October 2005. Geograph via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

Today

  • A dual carriageway dipping into an underpass.
    Suffolk Street Queensway underpass, 24 May 2011Roy Hughes, 24 May 2011. Geograph via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0
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Sources and further reading
Where the sources differ

Whether the Horse Fair mosaic is still in place in 2026 has not been checked.

  1. The Inner Ring Road, Underpasses & Murals of Birmingham — Keith M. Jordan, Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group, 2006. pp. 19–20
  2. Ringway: The Birmingham Inner Ring Road Stage 1 (film, 1963) — catalogue record — Media Archive for Central England, MACE, University of Lincoln, 1963
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