These photographs are included in a small archive of photographs and other documents held at Stirchley Library. The see the list of these photographs, click here.
These photographs are “Series 1” contained in “Box 2”, and depict the River Rea along its route. They are taken at several points along the river, but each one is taken further downstream from the last.
During Birmingham Heritage Week at the beginning of September, we organised a heritage walk along the River Rea. This followed six bird portraits by local artist Stephen Earl Rogers positioned in community gardens run by Fruit & Nut Village, and a talk on route about the history of the Rea in Stirchley by Jen Dixon.
This guide provides an outline of the walk so you can go hunting for the six birds yourself, with the aid of the map (above).
The walk began in the Forest Garden at the rear of Stirchley Library …
The Rea is a well-known companion to Stirchley, flowing gently to the east, tucked away in the parks and behind houses.
A couple of the volunteers have been ordering and cataloguing some of the photographs of the Rea which are kept in the library (see some of them here). As part of this we started to work out where some of the more local ones had been taken and drew a rough map….. which has now become a slightly less rough map.
Using Ordinance Survey maps from the 1880s and 1890s, we traced the meandering Rea and some of …
It is uncertain how old the place name of Lifford is. It is thought that the Roman Road Icknield Street crossed the River Rea here, and a ford is a river crossing point. The name Lifford, though, cannot be found in reference to this area before the arrival of Viscount Lifford who bought, what is now Lifford Hall, in 1781. The first record of the area being called Lifford is in 1785, when “Thomas Dobbs of Lifford” was noted at “Lifford Rolling Mill”, but this seems an incredibly short space of time …
The Hazel Well (as explored in a previous post, here) was possibly a natural spring rising in Stirchley, where Hazelwell Park is now. Along the route of the River Rea through Stirchley and nearby, there are several brooks. Some are well-known, such as two confusingly named Bourn Brook and the Bourn. These are longer brooks which still survive today. The Bourn Brook meets the Rea near Cannon Hill Park, and the Bourn joins it a little north of Cartland Road.
There were other lesser known brooks, such as Cotteridge Brook and Breedon Brook, the latter seemingly now gone from …