The Kingstanding pub

In August 1936 somebody posted a picture postcard of the new pub at the Circle. Through a wrought-iron arch lettered Mitchells & Butlers you could see Dutch gables, tall chimneys and striped brick gate piers topped with obelisks. Over the arch hung the inn sign, a rider on a white horse. The card called the place simply “The Kingstanding”.

It was the estate’s own pub, built, as the historian William Dargue puts it, “at the same time as the estate”. It filled the corner between Kingstanding Road and Kings Road, across the Circle from the Odeon, and for thirty years it was where Kingstanding drank, bowled, caught the bus and sent off its pigeons.

Rooms galore

“It had loads of rooms, smoke rooms, and bars,” Barry Gater told Voices of Kingstanding. “There were loads of rooms; rooms galore!” Steps at the front led up to a lawn with hedges, where children played hide and seek. The buses from town, the old No. 29, terminated at the pub. His father flew pigeons, and the racers brought their birds there in baskets to be taken off to the station. Barry Floyd remembered “a beautiful building with large chimneys and a big frontage”.

Robby Robinson was born in 1954, while his parents were living at the pub with his grandparents, Frank and Doris Robinson, the licensees. “The pubs were huge like hotels,” he wrote. Eric Levin worked in the Officers Lounge seven nights a week from 1960 to 1963. The landlord was a very large man and his wife about five foot five, “but no customer crossed her path”.

The green by Kings Road

The bowling green lay to one side, near Kings Road. Veronica Marshall’s parents both played crown green bowls for the pub, the men’s and women’s teams kept separate, and she spent summer evenings on the grass above the green while they played. A photograph of her father, Harry Marshall, shows him bowling in ordinary clothes and lace-up shoes, the small round mat under his back foot.

In the war the lawn had other customers. Alan Hitchman and his friends rode their bikes there to scrounge gum and “candy” from the American soldiers drinking on the grass. They “were always more successful if they had a girl friend with them.”

Three pubs on one corner

On 8 December 1966 the Birmingham Daily Post reported a new shopping centre opening “on the site of a historic inn at Kingstanding”. The Kingstanding had been demolished, and rebuilt with 29 shops and a supermarket. Mike Williams, a site engineer, remembered surveying the bowling green before it went; the turf was sold at half a crown a yard. Veronica Marshall thought it “a great pity” that the old building was replaced “with an inferior modern one”.

Mitchells & Butlers built three pubs on this site in all. The 1960s one was a flat-roofed block lettered KING’S STANDING. Around the end of the century that was replaced by a red-brick pub with a painted sign. It closed, stood for sale in January 2018, and lost its roof to fire in May 2019. The site became the car park of the new Lidl.

The name was older than any of the buildings. It came from the King’s Standing, the mound up the road where, the story goes, Charles I addressed his troops in 1642. Three pubs have stood on this corner and all three have gone. The name they carried has outlived every one of them.

Then and now

1936

2018

1965

2011