Birmingham Municipal Bank, Kingstanding

On Saturday 23 October 1937 the Lord Mayor of Birmingham, Alderman H. Roberts, stood in a new banking hall on Kingstanding Road in his chain of office, with the people of Kingstanding packed in around him. A plaque on the wall recorded the occasion. Photographs from that year show the building from the road: two storeys of red brick with sash windows, a stone ground floor lettered BIRMINGHAM MUNICIPAL BANK, and high wooden fences on either side.

The council’s own bank

The Birmingham Municipal Bank belonged to the city. It began in 1916 as a wartime savings bank, promoted by Neville Chamberlain when he was Lord Mayor, and became the Municipal Bank in 1919. By the start of the Second World War it had 63 branches, and for families moving out to the new estates it was the bank on the doorstep.

Kingstanding got its branch early. According to the bank’s historian, David Parkes, quoted on Voices of Kingstanding, it opened on 1 January 1932 as an evening branch at 595 Kingstanding Road, open on Mondays and Fridays from six to eight. The new building replaced that temporary accommodation in 1937, with daily opening, “and a substantial increase in transactions ensued.”

Money boxes and saving stamps

People remember the Municipal Bank as the place where saving started small. Veronica Marshall had a black metal money box with a gilt handle from the bank in the 1950s; it could only be opened at the counter, where the coins were counted and paid in. Terry Lewis remembered taking his money box to be opened and counted, and the day nursery next door. Valerie saved stamps at school, and when her card was full she took it to the bank for the cash: “we loved going in there made us feel rich.”

Walter Beech served in the RAF from 1945 to 1948 and had part of his pay sent home, where his mother paid it into the Municipal Bank. When he came out he went to draw it, and the teller persuaded him to leave five shillings in to keep the account open. He never touched it again. “I’m now in my 80,s,” he wrote in 2012, “maybe I’m a rich man and don’t know it.”

Ron Jameson kept his family’s bank book, its entries running from 1942 to 1944. On foot, Richard Wall remembered, the bank was a landmark on the way up to the Circle: past the nursery, the Municipal Bank, then a long wooden fence with the Labour Party’s hut halfway along.

From Municipal Bank to Lloyds

On 31 March 1976 the Municipal Bank closed its doors, and the next day it reopened as the Birmingham Municipal Trustee Savings Bank, later part of the TSB. The Kingstanding branch went with it, and by 2010 it was Lloyds TSB. Lloyds listed its branch at 595 Kingstanding Road for closure on 3 June 2026.

That is more than ninety years of Kingstanding paying in its savings at the same number on the same road, from a council counter open two evenings a week in 1932 to the Lloyds branch of 2026.