Paper Mill End and the Perry Barr mills

In 1834 William Bedson took a fourteen-year lease on the Lower Paper Mill at Perry Barr. The deed told him how to reach it: by “a passage way through Garrote Moor”. That one line joins up two and a half centuries of water power in the valley below Old Oscott, where the streets of Perry Beeches run today.

Blades before paper

The stream is the Hol Brook, which the Victoria County History calls the “Perry Stream or Barr Brook”. It comes down from Great Barr Park, past Booth’s Farm, and on to the Tame. Around 1560 there were four blade mills in Hamstead, Perry Barr and Oscott. One of them has a name: the Garrett blade mill, recorded in 1597 and still working in 1614. The county historians thought it “was probably situated at Garrett’s Moor near the head of the valley”.

In 1648 a paper mill “lately made by Humphrey Wyrley” is mentioned in the district. Two years later a lease of half of Perry Mill, on the Tame, barred the tenant from building a corn mill or a paper mill there — probably, the historians thought, to shield the new paper mill from competition.

Was the Garrett blade mill rebuilt as that paper mill? It is often said so. But the Victoria County History, the source for both mills, lists them separately. The link is possible, not proven.

Upper and Lower

By 1680 there were two paper mills. That year Sir John Wyrley leased a cottage, paper mill and premises at Perry Barr to Samuel Jerrom, and the county history describes the lease as covering “two paper mills”. Later deeds call them the Upper and the Lower Paper Mill. A document of 1691 deals with felling an oak on the dam of the Upper Paper Mill Pool and repairing the dam, and by 1820 the Upper mill was “now used as a blade mill”. The Wyrley Birch estate papers are dotted with the names Garratt’s Moor, Garratt’s Meadow, Furnace Moor, Paper Mill Pools and Paper Mills.

Because the Lower Paper Mill’s tenant in 1834 reached it through Garrett’s Moor, the Lower mill is the best candidate for the old Garrett site. That, too, is a possibility rather than a fact.

Wire, paper and gun barrels

The trades kept changing. A Gough mill near the Tame, driven by water from the Barr Brook, had been a blade mill and then a paper mill, and in the 1790s it was boring and grinding gun barrels. Papers from a lawsuit of 1794–1802 call it the “mill at Paper Mill End”. By 1814 it had become a wire mill, and by 1839 it was a paper mill again, owned by Joseph Webster.

In 1843 the tithe survey found four mills on the brook: Webster’s paper mill; a corn mill 200 yards above it, owned by John Gough; a wire mill half a mile higher, owned by Wyrley Birch and occupied by William Bedson; and a rolling mill 250 yards above that. By the 1880s all four had gone. P. W. King’s study of 2006, “Perry Barr and its Water Mills”, sorts out “about five mills” in Perry Barr in all.

Reading the old maps

Paper Mill End is named on Greenwood’s county map of 1820, and on the first Ordnance Survey map, revised in 1831–32, where the words sit over the brook at The Beeches. The six-inch map of the 1880s shows a Fish Pond below The Beeches, “Foot Bridges” downstream and a small building on a side channel. By 1901 that building has a name: “Wiremill Cottage”. It stood about 250 metres below the pool dam — close to the 250 yards between the wire mill and the rolling mill in 1843. So the wire mill may have stood at Wiremill Cottage, and the rolling mill at the Fish Pond dam.

The 1881 census, as transcribed by a local researcher, lists a “Paper Mill End Cottage” and a “Wire Mill Cottage”. The old field name lived on too: in 1875 John Swinnerton was farming at “Garrotts”.

What the streets remember

The Fish Pond has gone, and Vicarage Close now covers its site. Wiremill Close, about 400 metres to the east, was named in the mills’ memory, but it is not where they stood. Grindleford Road runs close to the old dam, yet its name almost certainly comes from the set of post-war Perry Beeches streets named after Peak District places, such as Hathersage, Castleton and Tideswell. No document yet found calls the mill “Grindleford”.

The name that has lasted is the oldest one. The industrial estate near Aldridge Road is still called Paper Mill End, more than four hundred years after the Garrett blade mill was first recorded.