Warren Farm and Lodge Pool

On 30 April 1872 a newspaper reported that lightning had struck a stable “on the premises of Mr. Short, of the Warren Farm, Perry Barr”. There were two horses inside. One was killed.

It is the earliest use of the name Warren Farm found so far. Five years earlier the Short family had given their address as “Warren House”, and before that the building had other names again. Those names tell the story of this corner of Kingstanding, from rabbit warren to council estate. Stand near the corner of Charlton Road and Dulwich Road today and you are close to where the farmyard was.

A lodge on the rabbit heath

In 1775 William Yates’s map of Staffordshire showed open heath across this ground, with a building in a small square enclosure lettered simply “Lodge”. The archaeologist Mike Hodder identified it with this house, although Yates’s map is too loose for the match to be proved from the maps alone. An Ordnance Survey drawing of 1817 calls it “The Lodge”. The one-inch map, revised in 1831–32, hedges its bets: “The Lodge or Warren House”.

The second name gives the game away. This was warren country. The Act of 1811 that enclosed the heath named “Perry Warren” and “Kingstanding Warren” alongside Perry Barr Common itself, and Hodder links this house with the management of rabbit warrens.

When the house was photographed for a sale catalogue in 1921 it was brick-built with stone dressings and Dutch gables, a style Hodder dated to the late seventeenth century.

Shorts, Fulfords and Wells

By 1850 John and Joseph Fulford were farming at “Warren House”. John Short was there by 1867, and Thomas Short in 1875. In 1877 the farm was offered to let, with a “comfortable” farmhouse and labourers’ cottages on “Sound Turnip and Barley Land, very suitable for Sheep Farming”.

Augustine Lewis Wells was farming here by 1887. In November 1888 Mrs Elizabeth Wells, of Warren Farm, was killed in an accident while her groom drove her towards Birmingham in a trap. Wells became a magistrate and served more than twenty years on the West Bromwich Board of Guardians. When he died in 1934, aged 87, he was remembered as “one of the largest potato-growers in the district”, and his obituary said he had “owned the Warren Farm”. He had not always owned it. In 1921 Lord Calthorpe’s Perry Hall estate put “Warren and Pool Farm”, 308 acres, up for auction, so Wells probably bought it at or after that sale.

The pool and the ram

North of the farm lay Lodge Pool. The map of 1831–32 names it and draws a small square pool, apparently banked, with a stream running east. It probably took its name from The Lodge next door. The Ordnance Survey drew it as open water in 1882–83. By 1901 it had become marsh, and at its eastern end, below the dam, the map marks a “Hydraulic Ram”, a pump driven by the force of the flowing water itself. What it supplied, no record yet says.

The water came from the north. The 1913 map marks a spring rising beside King’s Vale Cottages, near Holly Lane, with a ditch running south to the pool and a line carrying on east from the ram.

Pool Farm and the Rodwell Grove cottages

West of the pool, down a lane off Holly Lane, stood Pool Farm, with its own well. Its buildings are on the 1882–83 survey, but the name first appears on the map of 1901. The lane is still there: it is Rodwell Grove.

The two short rows of cottages in Rodwell Grove are sometimes called Pool Farm Cottages and said to date from 1840. The maps say otherwise. They are missing from the surveys of 1882–83, 1901 and 1913, so they were built after 1913, either in the last years of the farm or as the estate arrived.

Streets over the fields

The government file on the council’s compulsory purchase order is titled “Kingstanding Estate, Warren Farm Pool”. On 16 September 1929 a photographer recorded the site being prepared for building, and by September 1930 houses on the Warren Farm portion were occupied.

Lay the old maps over the new and the farm falls between Chingford Road and Dulwich Road, near Charlton Road. Pool Farm stood between today’s Tansley Road and Cranbourne Road. Lodge Pool lies under the western curve of the Danesbury Crescent and Warren Farm Road loop, and the ram stood near where Warren Farm Road meets Aylesbury Crescent.

The rabbits, the pool and the Dutch gables have gone. The name has not. It is on Warren Farm Road and on the Warren Farm Lodge care home: a warrener’s lodge on the heath, still giving directions long after the last rabbit was caught.