Messuage Farm

In 1930 Birmingham’s City Engineer and Surveyor’s office drew up a plan for a new estate between Kingstanding Road, Kings Road, Queslett Road and Kingstanding Wood. Its title named two farms: “Kettlehouse Farm and Messuage Farm estates … Layout for 1,980 houses.”

Six years later a revised plan went out under a shorter title: “Kettlehouse Farm estate”. Messuage had gone. Kettlehouse lived on as a road and a name everyone in Kingstanding knows. Messuage Farm vanished almost without trace.

A farm across the road

The odd thing is that Messuage Farm never stood on the estate at all. The Ordnance Survey maps of 1882–83 and 1901 put it on the far side of the Queslett to Sutton road, in the angle where Doe Bank Lane met it, a small farmstead with a well beside the house. Today that is the corner of Queslett Road East and Doe Bank Lane, opposite the end of Cooksey Lane, right on the boundary between Birmingham and Walsall. Its neighbour Doe Bank Farm, about 150 metres up the lane, still stands.

So the farmhouse was in Great Barr, looking across the road at Kingstanding. The council’s plan covered the ground south of Queslett Road, which suggests that at least some of the farm’s fields lay on the Kingstanding side. Exactly which ones has not yet been traced.

Carved from the common

The farm’s deeds survive in the Gough family papers at the Library of Birmingham, under the heading “Messuage Farm”. The earliest, of 1807, concerns land in Great Barr that was “part of Great Barr Common, near to the road from Quiecelet in Perry Barr to Sutton.” An abstract drawn up in 1857 traces Sir Francis Edward Scott’s title to “a cottage and land in Great Barr” back to 1793. That year Scott conveyed the “Messuage and land in Great Barr adjoining the highway from Queslet to Sutton” to Lord Calthorpe and the trustees of the Perry Hall estate.

“Messuage” is an old legal word for a dwelling-house with its land. It may be that the farm simply kept the lawyers’ word as its name, and that it began as a cottage on the edge of the common. Both ideas fit the deeds, though neither is proved.

Sold, and sold again

In September 1921 Lord Calthorpe put a large part of the Perry Hall estate up for auction. “Messuage Farm, New Oscott, 62 acres, let at £134, was withdrawn at £2,800.” That autumn a farm labourer, William George Judd, gave the farm as his address. In February 1922 the auctioneers announced that Messuage Farm had been sold by private treaty.

By 1926 it belonged to a farmer who, a court heard, had also “studied astrology”. The report said only that “he owned a small property at Oscott, known as Messuage Farm”.

Lived in while the estate rose

The estate was built, but the farmhouse was not pulled down with it. Alexander Read gave his address as Messuage Farm in 1931, and a greyhound trainer, Frederick Faulding, in 1935. In 1939 a county court was asked whether “a house and land known as Messuage Farm, Queslett Road, Great Barr” was protected by the Agricultural Holdings Act.

That is probably why the name slipped off the plans. The house stood on the Great Barr side of the road, outside the new estate, and by 1936 the whole scheme was simply the Kettlehouse Farm estate.

Local memory has a Co-op dairy depot and later a petrol station on or beside the site. Stand at the end of Doe Bank Lane now and there is a fenced compound by the junction, with traffic running along Queslett Road East where the old boundary ran.

Nothing of the farmhouse is known to survive. But for a few years a small farm carved out of Great Barr Common gave its name to the plan that laid out a whole corner of Kingstanding, and that name was, most likely, a word lifted straight from the lawyers’ deeds.