The Old Crown, Deritend

History

The house Leland saw

In the late 1530s the antiquary John Leland rode into Birmingham from the south. At the end of Deritend, by the river, he noted “a propper chappel and mansion-house of timber, hard on the ripe, as the brook runneth down”. The chapel was St John’s. The Victoria County History identifies the timber house with the Old Crown, still standing on the corner of Heath Mill Lane.

It is, in the VCH’s words, “the oldest secular building to survive in the central area of the modern city”. A date of 1368 has long been claimed for it. Historic England and the VCH think the house more probably early sixteenth century. A deed of 1517 was sealed with a device like those on one of its plaster ceilings. Its Victorian owner held deeds of 1401 and 1404, but they may describe the plot rather than the house that stands now.

Jettied and gabled

The Old Crown is two storeys high “and always so”, as the list entry puts it. The close-studded upper floor juts out over the street. Five bays run along the front: a big gable at each end with carved beams, and in the middle a gabled porch wing on brackets.

Joshua Toulmin Smith measured the main house in 1863 at 71 feet 4 inches long and just over 20 feet deep, over arched cellars. Upstairs, a “Gallorye chamber” over the entrance pushes out more than four feet beyond the jetty. A well in the courtyard behind was more than 38 feet deep.

The same spot, then and now

1888–1913

Today

It did not stay one house. By 1684 it had been divided in two, and by 1693 into three. People often say it was built as the guildhall and school of the Deritend guild. That is tradition: the guild did pay a schoolmaster priest, but no document ties him to this building.

The man who said no

In the nineteenth century Birmingham wanted wider streets, and the old house was in the way. Its owner, Joshua Toulmin Smith (1816–69), a lawyer and antiquary, opposed its demolition on three separate occasions. In 1862 he restored it, replacing the old outbuildings on Heath Mill Lane with a brick wing. The next year he published its story, Memorials of Old Birmingham: Traditions of the Old Crown House.

Pots under the pavement

The ground around it is old too. When High Street Deritend was widened in 1953, misfired pottery turned up south of the road, the first evidence that the glazed jugs and cooking pots now known as Deritend ware were made here in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. More has been found at the Old Crown itself. The city council’s leaflet says the house stands on the site of a thirteenth-century kiln, but specialists have challenged the reading of the finds as kiln waste, so that claim needs care. Tanning pits have been excavated on the plots running down to the Rea.

Still open

The Old Crown was listed in 1952 and is now Grade II*. It is still a pub. St John’s Chapel has gone, the Golden Lion has moved to Cannon Hill Park and the Rea runs out of sight in a culvert. Of everything Leland passed at the end of Deritend nearly five hundred years ago, the timber house is the one thing still standing where he saw it.