Smallbrook Street

History

Smallbrook Street took its name from a family, not a stream. The Victoria County History explains that in the early eighteenth century one of the few areas where Birmingham could still grow was “the land belonging to Richard Smallbrook just beyond St. Martin’s Rectory”, and that “it was by association with this land that Smallbrook Street acquired its name”. Smallbrook leased the plot in 1707 to a gunsmith, Samuel Vaughton, and building followed.

The street sat on very old ground. The VCH notes that the medieval parsonage, with its own moat, had stood “at what was later the junction of Smallbrook Street and Pershore Street”.

A working street

For two centuries Smallbrook Street was an ordinary, busy town street on the edge of the markets. A plate published in The Buildings of Birmingham, Past and Present in 1869 shows the Malt Shovel Inn there, a low old building squeezed among its neighbours. It was the kind of street the Victorian town was full of: narrow frontages, shops below, rooms above, yards behind.

First in line

It was also exactly where Herbert Manzoni’s department chose to start. When the Minister of Transport finally released funding in January 1957, work began on the first section of the Inner Ring Road, between Horse Fair and New Street station. A photograph reproduced by Keith Jordan is captioned “Smallbrook Street/Suffolk Street – clearing the way for Smallbrook Queensway 1957”. A local history of the area puts it bluntly: by 1959 “all the premises in Smallbrook Street were razed to the ground”.

On 8 April 1959 the Hill Street to Hurst Street subway opened beneath the new road. Jordan says it was the first in the country to be the only way pedestrians could cross. The Victoria County History records that the first stretch, “the Smallbrook Ringway and shopping centre, running from Horse Fair to Queen’s Drive, was opened in 1960”.

A street rebuilt as a road

What went up was not a street in the old sense. On the south side James A. Roberts designed a long, curving block of shops and offices, the Ringway Centre. Larkham explains that its narrow plan was forced “by the limited land available through the compulsory purchase scheme”. Opposite rose Roberts’s Albany Hotel. Within three years Smallbrook Street had gone from a jumble of old buildings to Birmingham’s first view of the modern city.

What happened here?

Then A street of shops, workshops and pubs, built up from the early eighteenth century on Richard Smallbrook’s land between the Bull Ring and Horse Fair.

What happened From 1957 its buildings were demolished, and Smallbrook Ringway, the first section of the Inner Ring Road, was built along it and opened in 1960.

Why It lay on the line of the Inner Ring Road, authorised by the Birmingham Corporation Act 1946. When the Minister of Transport approved funding in January 1957, this was the section the city built first.

What replaced it Smallbrook Ringway (later Smallbrook Queensway), with James A. Roberts’s Ringway Centre on the south side and the Albany Hotel opposite.

Now Smallbrook Queensway, a busy dual carriageway between Holloway Circus and the Bullring.

Why it disappeared

Road building · Redevelopment

The Inner Ring Road scheme. Funding was approved by the Minister of Transport on 18 January 1957 and work began on the first section between Horse Fair and New Street station (Jordan; Larkham). The street’s buildings were cleared from 1957 (Jordan’s photograph caption) and Smallbrook Ringway opened in 1960 (VCH).