The King Charles

“I grew up listening to the music from the King Charles on a saturday night,” Marlene Sale wrote on Voices of Kingstanding. Her family lived in Longford Road, behind the pub. Now and then her parents took her down to sit in the grounds at the back with a bottle of pop and a bag of crisps. She still had the scar from jumping the iron railings round the pub on roller skates.

The King Charles stood on the corner of Kings Road and Hartley Road, across from the end of Finchley Road. Everyone called it “the Charlie”. Its name came from the same story as the estate’s: that Charles I once stood on the King’s Standing up the road.

Vimto by the railings

The Charlie was a family pub in the old way, parents inside and children outside. Pauline Arnold remembered “a vimto and packet of crisps outside”. Phil Brown, who grew up at 219 Kings Road, waited there for his father to come out with the same. Barbara Copson’s aunt lived in Longford Road, and “we often spent happy times in the grounds of the pub when summers were long and hot!”

Darts, piano and the big room

Carole Müller’s Aunt Rene was a barmaid there in the early years of the war, so the pub was open by then. Steve Howell’s father played in its darts team in the late 1950s and 1960s. Alan Howell played the piano in the bar for about a year: “Friendly old pub.” Clement Watts sang and danced there and sat “with the irish in the bar”. Phil Brown, when he was older, put on film shows “in the big room at the end of the pub”. On the Birmingham History Forum, regulars remembered a concert room and dances.

Pauline Arnold’s mother, Nell Murphy, worked at the Charlie for many years in the 1960s and 1970s, with her father Bill “the other side of the bar”. Mr and Mrs Lawley ran the pub then, and she remembered George, the glass collector. Later, Karen Bradley stayed there with a friend whose father, Seamus McBride, was running it.

Pauline Truelove remembered “the big party they had when Di and Charles married” in 1981, and also that “it was a formidable place to walk past as a teen”.

Houses on the corner

The King Charles has gone. A Birmingham History Forum poster wrote in 2007 that it was “long since gone, houses built there now”; one Voices of Kingstanding reader’s father lives in flats on the site. In 2018 Karen Bradley still lived close to “the place where the pub once stood”.

The pub has gone from the corner. On Voices of Kingstanding the Charlie’s regulars are still calling out to one another across the room, half a century on.