King's Norton

Kings Norton is just over five miles from the bustling centre of Birmingham, close to the city boundary with Hereford and Worcester,yet it retains considerable evidence of its past history, with its Roman road and cluster of old buildings around a village green. The thirteenth-century parish churchcof St Nicolas with its crocketed spire is a well known landmark and just one of the buildings of historic interest. There is also the Saracens Head, a fifteenth-century wool merchant's house where Queen Henrietta Maria stayed overnight during the Civil War and the Old Grammar School, where Thomas Hall was the seventeenth-century headmaster, a Puritan with a poor opinion of women!

Despite its rural origins, Kings Norton has also seen the rise of a number of industries, due mainly to the two major canals, the Worcester and Birmingham and the Stratford upon Avon, which meet at Lifford and the two railway lines, the LMS and the GWR, that divide the area.

Drawn from the extensive photographic archive of the Local Studies and History Section of Birmingham Central Library, this fascinating collection of over 200 old photographs vividly reflects many of the changes that have occurred in the area since the turn of the century and even before. Pauline Caswell, who works at Kings Heath Library, is the author of Northfield in the same series.