Description:Merrishaw Road Children's Home was a purpose-built home designed as what was known as a ‘family group home' on the newly-built West Heath housing estate.
The home was part of a programme of new children’s homes, each built on newly developing housing estates, which were to be small family homes – a move away from the larger children’s homes favoured in the first half of the twentieth century. These homes were built on the principle of a small ‘family’ unit in a house that looked very much like any other on the estate. The first of these homes was completed in 1951, and a further 11, one of which was Merrishaw Road in 1963, were built over the following eleven years. A second children’s home was built on the same estate at the same time – on Alvechurch Road.
Both homes were designed to accommodate eight children and were designed so that houseparents (generally a married couple) would live in the children’s home, with, if they had any, their own children. From 1970 Norma and Bob Bickley were the houseparents of Merrishaw Road.
Here they describe the house:
"The main building was just a double council house that’s what it was - double house with a neighbour on the end – and she worked in the children’s home. It was It was semi-detached except that our bit was longer, it was double the size. You walked in the front door we had our sitting room on the left. And then sort of down the hall, cloakroom, straight forward into a laundry room with a back door outside to the infamous outside toilet. Kitchen, nice ordinary family kitchen, pantry, into the playroom. The children’s room, the playroom, at one end was a sitting room, it had got like a settee and armchairs and fireside chairs there and then the other half was the dining room tables.
"Upstairs, our bedroom at the top of the stairs and a bathroom opposite, the children’s bathroom. Then we had our own bathroom. A bathroom for the children. Linen cupboard, a little single room that was counted as a sick room but we used to use it for the eldest child got that room to do as they pleased. They had that as their own room they could paint it sky blue pink if they wanted it. We kept it quite nice, put nice things in there and they kept all their own stuff, kept it clean themselves. Again there was a little bedroom on the end, another single bedroom. There was always somebody in the single room, the teenage room, the oldest person’s room. There was, the bedroom on the end, my two daughters had. It was a single room but we had two beds in there, so they slept in there. Then the girls’ room and the boys’ room.
"There would be three in one room, four in the other, depending who was in the single room. They had fitted wardrobes, big fitted wardrobes in the room, so all the clothes went in the one wardrobe."
Merrishaw closed as a children’s home at the end of 1980 less than twenty years after it had opened.
After closing as a children’s home, the newly created-District home-finding team was based in the building from 1981.
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Image: The building in 2010. Photograph taken with the kind permission of the current owner.
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Source: This history was compiled by the Birmingham Children's Homes Project, an initiative to explore Birmingham City Council-run children’s homes between 1949 and 1990.