Old Square

History

In the Middle Ages the Hospital of St Thomas, the priory that gave the area its name, stood here. After it was dissolved its land passed through several hands. About 1700 John Pemberton bought the block between Bull Street, Steelhouse Lane, Dale End and Stafford Street, and, the Victoria County History says, “enforced covenants to ensure that it remained a select residential district”.

A square for the rich

The Square itself followed, around 1713. The VCH describes it as “16 more or less uniform two-storied houses, their five-bayed fronts having angle pilasters, pedimented doorways, and dormer windows”, entered “by a street in the middle of each side”. William Westley engraved it in 1732: a neat, ordered space in a town better known for workshops.

Its residents were Birmingham’s elite. Edmund Hector, the surgeon, lived at No. 1, where Samuel Johnson came to visit; panelling from that house is preserved at Aston Hall. Keith Jordan’s account of the 1967 mural in the square lists other residents, among them Samuel Lloyd the banker and William Scholefield, the town’s first mayor in 1838.

Swept away by a boulevard

The square was not destroyed by the twentieth century. It was the nineteenth that did it. Joseph Chamberlain’s Improvement Scheme drove Corporation Street through the old town, its first stretch opening in 1879, and the historian Chris Upton notes that along with the slums it removed “the grand if decaying houses of Old Square”. The VCH is exact: Old Square was “the first important group to go … largely destroyed in 1882 for the construction of Corporation Street”. By 1897, when Hill and Dent published their Memorials of the Old Square, they could print a plan setting the square of 1797 against the streets of 1897, with Corporation Street slicing straight across it. The mural key reproduced by Jordan says the last of the houses came down in 1895.

The name that would not die

The space lived on as a busy road junction lined with shops and offices, including Lewis’s department store. Then, in the 1960s, the Inner Ring Road arrived. John Ball photographed the newly built Priory Ringway in 1964, running from Old Square down to Masshouse Circus. Old Square became a sunken shopping precinct and subway junction. In 1967 the Public Works Department commissioned Kenneth Budd’s firm to make a mural of the square’s history for it, in cast brass and iron.

The same spot, then and now

1888–1913

Today

That precinct has gone too. The hole has been filled in and the square raised back to street level, with Budd’s mural put back in its place. The Georgian houses are long gone, but their square still has a name, and a monument to what it once was.

What happened here?

Then A Georgian residential square of sixteen houses (c.1713), on the land of the medieval priory, home to the town’s leading families.

What happened Largely destroyed in 1882 for Corporation Street; the last houses were demolished by 1895.

Why Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham Improvement Scheme (1875–76), which cleared slums and old property to lay out Corporation Street.

What replaced it Victorian and Edwardian commercial buildings round a road junction; from the 1960s, Priory Queensway and a sunken precinct with Kenneth Budd’s 1967 mural.

Now A paved, tree-planted square at street level on Priory Queensway, with Budd’s mural reinstated.

Why it disappeared

Slum clearance · Redevelopment

Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham Improvement Scheme. The VCH records the square was “largely destroyed in 1882 for the construction of Corporation Street”; Upton lists its “grand if decaying houses” among the buildings the scheme removed.