Kingstanding Police Station

When Walter Beech was a boy on the corner of Cooksey Lane and Esher Road, a lorry swung round the corner and a bag rolled off the back: a round army-style kit bag, about four feet long. His father told him to take it to the police station. So the next day he slung it over his shoulder and carried it “all the way down the Kingstanding Hill to the Police Station”. They took his name and address and said they would let him know. He never heard another word.

For most of the estate’s life, the police station on Kingstanding Road, just off the Circle, was where you took things: lost property, stray dogs, worries.

The siren on the roof

When it opened is not recorded in our sources. Richard Wall knew it around 1940, when he walked round the Circle as a boy. It stood opposite Roses the greengrocer, with the billiard hall next door, and “on its roof was a siren which would warn us of air raids and of the ‘all clear’.” The billiard hall is still beside it.

Walter Beech remembered another use for the front of the building. When he spent three months in Little Bromwich Hospital with diphtheria, the station had a notice board outside showing what was called the Danger List, the names of patients in danger of dying. “My mother told me that my name was on it for Three Weeks.”

Bobbies and neighbours

Policing here was local and personal. Carol’s grandfather was a sergeant, and the family lived in one of the police houses on Kingstanding Road on the other side of the Circle. John Bolton, born in Hurlingham Road in 1936, remembered the local bobby, Mr Summers, who lived at the top end of the road: “Nice bloke, always fair.” Chris Coleman’s father, Len Talbot of Sidcup Road, was a special constable in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Marilyn Grimmett’s story is from the 1960s. One Christmas Eve a big dog turned up on the doorstep in Abney Grove, off Bendall Road. The family fed him over Christmas, then took him, in tears, to Kingstanding police station. Walking home down Kings Road, they heard him running up behind them: he had escaped. They took him home again and advertised in the Evening Mail until his owner came to claim him. “I can still see that lovely dog’s kind face.”

Open eight till eleven

The station was photographed for the Warwickshire Photographic Survey in 1984. In the mid-1990s the Great Barr Observer’s weekly information column still gave its number, 0121 354 1111, and in August 1995 listed it as open from 8am to 11pm.

In 2019, according to Wikipedia’s list of West Midlands police stations, the force declared it surplus and closed it. The building was sold, and planning applications followed to turn it into four flats and a takeaway. When our archive photographed it in March 2025, it was a pizza shop.

The siren has long gone from the roof. But the building still stands by the Circle, and for anyone who once carried a kit bag or a runaway dog through its door, it will always be the police station.