Landmarks & green spaces
Ancient and modern, built and green — the landmarks that give this corner of Birmingham its character, and some of what we’ve lost along the way.
The Bronze Age burial mound that gives the whole district its name — a scheduled ancient monument some three thousand years old, beside the line of the Roman Icknield Street, and by tradition the spot where Charles I reviewed his troops in 1642.
The great roundabout where Kings Road meets Kingstanding Road — the heart of the estate since the 1930s, ringed by its shops and parades, with the Odeon’s tower rising beside it.
Martin Richard Phelan · CC BY-SA 2.0
The original home of Oscott College and, from 1846, the house St John Henry Newman named Maryvale. Later a Sisters of Mercy orphanage for almost 130 years, and now the Maryvale Institute — a place of national significance on a Kingstanding hill.
Open green playing fields in the middle of the estate — room to run, play and walk, and one of the everyday green spaces that give Kingstanding its breathing room.
Paul Collins · CC BY-SA 2.0
One of the parish churches the estate grew as it went up. Kingstanding’s new streets built their own places of worship and community in the 1930s and after — St Mark’s among them.
Andy Mabbett, 2020 · CC BY-SA 4.0
A surviving plantation to the north of the estate, established in the early nineteenth century — a green remnant of the older landscape the houses were built across.
Not everything survived. The Woolworths on Hawthorn Road, shops and pubs that anchored the parades, corners of the old estate remade over ninety years — much of it lives now only in memory and family photographs. Gathering it before it’s gone for good is exactly what this group is for, so the Odeon isn’t the only piece of Kingstanding we manage to save.
Roy Hughes · CC BY-SA 2.0History sourced from Historic England’s listing and scheduling records, the Birmingham history research of Bill Dargue, and Wikipedia. Photographs are used under Creative Commons licences and credited to their photographers — full details on our photo credits page.
