Saltbox

In the spring of 1875 a man named Cooper, sick with smallpox, walked out of a cottage at Queslett. On 4 June the Birmingham Mail ran the story under a furious headline, “Smallpox Manufactory at Barr”, and named the cottage he had left: a cottage “in the parish of Perry Barr, known as ‘The Salt Box.’”

That is the earliest use of the name found in any record. Saltbox was a tiny roadside hamlet on the old road running north from Queslett towards Lichfield, right on the edge of what would become the Kingstanding estate. Stand today on Queslett Road East, where Lambeth Road and Sundridge Road run off it, and you are about as close as anyone can now get to it.

Carved out of the common

Saltbox was a child of enclosure. Until the Act of 1811 and the award of 1814 this was open heath, Perry Barr Common. Once the common had been divided up, plots along its roads could be bought and sold like any other land.

The deeds survive among the Gough family papers at the Library of Birmingham. In 1841 William Matthison passed to Thomas Bayliss “land enclosed from the common on the road leading from Great Barr to Lichfield, in Perry Barr”. In 1856 Bayliss sold it to Lord Calthorpe and the trustees of the Perry Hall estate, as land “enclosed from Perry Barr Common”. Archivists later filed these papers under the heading “Salt Box”, but the deeds themselves, as catalogued, never use the name. Why anyone called the place Saltbox is not recorded.

Smallpox on the Lichfield road

The 1875 reports give a rare look through the cottage doors. A few days after the Mail’s story, the Birmingham Morning News reported that on 17 May William Reynolds had been found “at the Saltbox, Queeslet”, badly ill with the disease, and that his wife had only just recovered.

By July the case had become part of an argument in the papers about where the disease had and had not reached. One report put it bluntly: “There had been no case of small pox at Great Barr at all. There was one at the ‘Salt Box’ at Perry Barr.”

On the maps

The Ordnance Survey surveyors reached Queslett in 1882–83 and printed “Saltbox” beside a small cluster of buildings on the road lettered “To Lichfield”, with a well and a pump among the gardens. The name is there again on the six-inch map revised in 1901, and on the 25-inch map revised in 1913. All around it the maps show long, straight hedges running across what had been heath: the new fields of the enclosed common, with Saltbox strung along the road between them.

Still there in 1935

It has often been said that Saltbox vanished when the council began building its Kingstanding estates around 1928–30. The evidence says otherwise. In November 1935 the Walsall Observer carried a death notice for Charlotte Dawson, a “beloved wife and mother”, aged 73. She had died “At the Saltbox, Queslett”. Five years into the building of the estate, people were still living there.

The Library of Birmingham also holds a photograph, “Salt Box Cottages near Queslett Road”, reprinted from an original taken around 1930. When the last cottage came down is not yet known.

No street carries the name today. But for the best part of a century people on the Lichfield road knew exactly where the Saltbox was, and a bundle of deeds, a smallpox scare and one family’s notice in 1935 are enough to put it back on the map.