Location: Witton

Above: Serpentine Road as it was in the mid 1980s before the buildings you see here were demolished and replaced by modern housing. The road begins opposite an entrance to Aston Hall & Park and leads to the Serpentine Grounds, which in my youth was the local site for the Pat Collins' Onion Fair. More recently it was the site of an Asda store until it moved a couple of miles to the One Stop shopping centre in Perry Barr.xxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxOlympus 35RC camera

Witton is approximately 3 miles north of Birmingham City Centre and a mile from the M6 Junction 6, "Spaghetti Junction," said to be Europe's largest and most complex road interchange system. It is the home of the Witton Tram Shed, a workshop and museum dedicated to restoration and preservation of old public service vehicles and which, last year jointly with Wythall Transport Museum, has an annual open day in the summer.

Aston Villa Football Club is also situated here and its main claim to fame, as far as I am concerned, is that my late maternal grand-father, Frank Barson, was a member of its 1920-1921 F.A. Cup Winning Team. He is pictured right, from the team photograph. Today the club is impelled by ambition and greed to expand well beyond its function as a football game venue to encroach upon the grounds of historic Aston Hall and Park, originally with the intention of blocking an important road in the process. It was heartening to see the local population, normally quite apathetic, protesting vigorously against these plans but sadly greed has prevailed and the vandalism is going ahead through 2000.

Witton Railway Station is situated on the line connecting Walsall with Birmingham New Street, and is obvious that this station would not remain open were it not for serving the supporters of Aston Villa.

The small photograph at top left of this page is of the lock keeper's cottage at Witton Lock,
opposite which, in the 1960s, I remember narrowboats being loaded at the bays at the rear of the firm of Forgings & Presswork Ltd (now Vetchbury Steel). Nowadays it is most rare to see any type of vessel using this stretch of canal, though a local security guard said that there is some Sunday leisure traffic.

Left: The Yew Tree public house is in Brookvale Road opposite the River Tame. Several decades ago, before Severn Trent Water constructed a very efficient flood relief system, the river flooded almost annually, and the Yew Tree would be among the first buildings to be affected - and among the last to benefit when the water receded.

A brick wall along the river bank to effectively retain flood water was built at the expense of hundreds of yards of decorative wrought iron railings.

Left: Since this was taken (from the other side of the bridge from the lock keeper's cottage) in Winter 1994, all of the buildings on the right hand side of the canal have been demolished to make room for the Junction Six Industrial Estate, thought by many residents to have been built for storage of hazardous chemicals or waste. Why else would the Council have changed the road priorities to lead the juggernauts unimpeded from the M6 straight into the estate?
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The view from Witton Station of some of the shops remaining in Witton Road. This was a thriving shopping centre up to 25 years ago but it is run down today. The proximity of Asda and the Perry Barr One Stop shopping centre doesn't help now, but the decline had begun well before they opened. A disproportionate influx of Asian immigrants with the wholesale displacement of the original population have greatly influenced the character of the area and this is naturally reflected in the remaining shops.

There used to be three banks in and around Witton Square and the last one, Lloyds, pictured above, inside and out, was located alongside the gatehouse of Imperial Metal Industries. As if to emphasise Witton's continuing decline, this bank too, closed in June 2000 and 'moved' to their existing Erdington branch.