Finding Places in Birmingham

Birmingham has changed its face many times as a result of its remarkable history. From a modest market town in the 1600s it blossomed during the Industrial Revolution.

Since the days of overcrowding and the resultant emergence of horrific slum conditions at the end of the 1800s there have been sweeping slum-clearance projects which have wiped many old roads from the map. More recently, in the 1960s and later, there have been (re-)development schemes which have created modern landmarks like the Rotunda, Bull Ring Shopping Centre and the road systems Queensway, Hockley Flyover, Aston Expressway and Spaghetti Junction, etc. Now we are witnessing the development of the canals of Ladywood into a marina complex and the redevelopment of the Bull Ring around St Martin's.

Under these circumstances trying to locate the addresses of our ancestors in no easy matter. This page will hopefully give assistance in this search. Maybe you'll be lucky and find what you're looking for on one of the road maps.

DISTRICTS

What we now know of as the City of Birmingham has of course grown to new proportions over the last two centuries. Districts such as Aston, Handsworth or Kings Norton have only relatively recently come under the administrative aegis of Greater Birmingham. Here is a map of the administrative districts of today's Birmingham as they were in the 1800s (28 kb).

MAPS	Here is a small selection of historical maps of Birmingham and environs. The originals are of course quite big, so it took a lot of compression to get them down to these quite acceptable file sizes. You might have to squint a bit, but I think it's all legible: John Speede map of 1610 (131 kb) Bradford map of 1750 (269 kb) Pigott map of 1828 (174 kb) A-Z road map of c. 1962 (178 kb)  with a streetfinder index!
	You might like to obtain your own maps. You could do worse than starting at Alan Godfrey Maps. They have over 1200 reprinted road maps from around the turn of the century including nearly all of Birmingham and most of the West Midlands in some detail. I find them fascinating, and at £2.10 very reasonably priced. For their current catalogue send an SAE to:   Alan Godfrey Maps   Prospect Business Park   Leadgate   Consett DH8 7PW   Tel: 01207 583388   Fax: 01207 583399   eMail: godfreyedition@btinternet.com
	Historical maps online can be found at http://www.old-maps.co.uk/
	If you're just trying to locate an area today you can do that online at Multimap

PARISH LOCATOR

An extremely useful resource for locating parishes not only in Birmingham is the programme Parish Locator. This freeware tool has been developed by several independent database programmers using data made available by Gerald Lawson. It allows you to enter a parish name and show neighbouring parishes within a radius defined by you. The results can then be displayed on a map of Britain showing coordinates, on a local topographical plot or simply in list form with distances and directions. It will also show the OS order number. The setup file is remarkably small and variations of it can be downloaded from the following sites: http://www.robslade.demon.co.uk/parish/parish.htm http://parloc.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/parlocdl.html

For a bit of fun, here are the BBC's webcams of the development of the Bull Ring next to St Martin's taken from the Rotunda.

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