Yew Tree Cottages, Booths Lane

In 1851 a directory of Staffordshire listed an artist, H. H. Hawley Hobday, at “Yew-tree cottage”, Perry Barr. The house he lived in is very probably the one that still stands on Booths Lane: a pair of stuccoed cottages, and the only cottages older than 1800 that our research has found still standing in this corner of Birmingham.

What the listing says

Yew Tree Cottages were listed Grade II on 8 July 1982. Historic England’s entry is short. It calls them “Probably late C17 origin, altered early C19 as 2 tenements” — a house of the later 1600s, divided into two homes in the early 1800s. They are two storeys high, of “stuccoed brick”. One doorway has a six-panel door “flanked by very slender pairs of fluted cast iron columns, under a hood”; the other is plain.

The entry has one oddity. Its heading calls the cottages “Nos 322 and 324”, but its description talks about No 320 and No 322. The slip is in the official text itself, which has not been amended since the cottages were listed.

On the old maps

The first Ordnance Survey map, revised in 1831–32, marks “Yew tree Cottage” on the lanes west of Oscott. The six-inch map of the 1880s shows “Yewtree Cottage” where Booth’s Lane meets the road to Aldridge, with a malthouse just to the north. By 1901 the label has become plural, “Yewtree Cottages” — two homes, as the listing says — and the malthouse is marked “(Disused)”, with Malthouse Cottages beside it.

Who lived there

Trade directories give a run of names at “Yew Tree cottage” in Perry Barr. Benjamin Wright was there in 1834. The artist Hawley Hobday followed by 1851. In 1858 it was the home of David Cope, a German silver spoon maker with a business in Birmingham. Mr John Starkey lived there in 1867, and J. Richards in 1875. The directories do not say which house they mean, but this is the only Yew Tree Cottage on the old maps of the area.

A corner of old Queslett

The cottages belonged to a scatter of farms and cottages west of Oscott. About half a kilometre along Booths Lane stood Booth’s Farm, raided in 1812 for William Booth’s forgery. Further west along the lane, Brook Cottage was sold with the Great Barr Hall estate in 1911. To the north, along Aldridge Road, were the two Queslett Farms, the Old Horns Inn and the smithy.

In the mid-2020s the cottages were offered for sale as needing modernisation. They are private homes, and best seen from the lane.

Still here

The farms, the old inn and the malthouse around them have all gone, and housing estates have grown up on every side. These two cottages were never swept away. More than three centuries after they were probably built, they are still homes, and they still carry the name the first Ordnance Survey map recorded.