Description:In October 1872, a group of seventeen men met at the Edgbaston Vestry Hall, and proceeded to Gooch Street to begin a ‘perambulation’ of the boundary of the Edgbaston Parish. The group included Vestry officials (called Overseers) and their assistants from the Edgbaston and Birmingham parishes and one from Harborne parish, representatives from the Calthorpe Estate (which owned much of Edgbaston parish), a surveyor and a valuer. This large group of men must have seemed quite imposing as it paraded around the borders of the parish.
The purpose was to establish and mark exactly the parish boundary. The document reports that stones, marked by the initials of neighbouring parishes were to be placed in various locations. For instance, a stone marked AE was to be placed on the bridge at Gooch Street to show that Aston and Edgbaston parishes met there. Hand-drawn maps accompanying the document show certain points along the boundary in detail. For instance, a map of the Bristol Road, at its junction with Edgbaston Park Road, shows the boundary following the course of the Bourn Brook. The University of Birmingham has since been built close to this site. The map showing Pebble Mill Road clearly shows the mill pond that used to occupy the site that the BBC vacated in 2004.
While securing the boundaries of a parish was not an uncommon activity, it may have had particular significance for the Edgbaston contingent of the perambulation group. Edgbaston had been developed since the late eighteenth century as an exclusive suburb, and it had a strong sense of itself. The Edgbastonia magazine proudly proclaimed Edgbaston to be the ‘West End Suburb of Birmingham’. In the 1870s Edgbaston was in the latter stages of a thirty-year explosion of population: between 1851 and 1881 numbers increased from 9,269 to 22,760.<small><sup>1</sup></small> Minutes from the Calthorpe Estate demonstrate the large number of land plots leased to speculative builders during the 1860s and 70s, particularly on the eastern part of the Estate. Address was important for social status then as now, and being within the parish of Edgbaston would have been desirable for any socially aspiring family.
<font color="#666633"><small><sup>1</sup> David Cannadine, Lords and Landlords: the Aristocracy and the Towns 1774-1967 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1980), p.95</small></font>