Course of the Chad Brook from source  (upper left) to the Bourn Brook.

The city of Birmingham, England, is large; but has only a few, very small watercourses. That’s because it’s located on a plateau. Not a very high one, true, but coupled with the fact that a very important watershed – between the Rivers Severn & Trent – runs just south of the city, streams & rivers simply don’t have any opportunity of growing, before they leave the plateau.

We had often thought of tracing the course of one of them, the 3-mile long Chad Brook, having lived near it in Harborne for many years, and finally began a couple of weeks ago. Why & whence ‘Chad’? It is true that St Chad (d. 872) was an important saint; nearby Lichfield Cathedral is dedicated to him, as indeed is the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Bimingham, consecrated in 1841. And there are apparently over forty sacred wells known as St. Chad’s Well in the U.K.

However, our Chad Brook is seemingly the only watercourse in the country called Chad. So is there an alternative origin? Yes there is; Anglo-Saxon c(e)ald + wella (cold + spring or stream) = Chadwell. Or indeed, Shadwell, not to mention Caldwell and Cauldwell, &c. (This from the Oxford Dictionary of English Place Names.) Another suggestion was sceald + wella (shallow + spring or stream) = Shadwell. Yet another on-line suggestions was scead-wella, scead being a boundary, and of course rivers & streams, however small, have been boundaries for thousands of years.

Indeed, the Chad Brook (in red) actually was the Parliamentary Boundary between Staffordshire & Warwickshire, as you see above, on a 6″ map from between 1883 and 1913. The actual source of the brook is unknown to me, but the main road (in blue) is almost certainly an ancient way, because I recall well, when cycling along the railway on the right of the map, which has been a walkway for many years, that once you had gone north under that road (the Hagley Road, or A456), you could freewheel for most of the rest of the way; and likewise coming back, you had to pedal to get to the Hagley Road, but once past it, you could freewheel going south. Therefore I decided that the Hagley Road was an ancient ridgeway, and passed by a spring or small pond, which which would have been very useful for the horses, not to mention their riders – or indeed, the ‘Old King’s Head’ Public House very close by!

The source may even be just north of the road, & culverted beneath it, but all has been built up for many years, and the Chad Brook now comes into the open air in the grounds of  a school.

We can also, with due acknowledgements, follow the Chad Brook via Google Maps:

As before, the brook is red. You will know, that if you try to follow a small brook or rivers from a satellite, you can never actually see it, only trace its path by the trees and shrubs which grow along its course, arch over it & conceal it. There is such a ‘tree path’ here. The Chad leaves the school grounds, and flows through the Meadow Road Allotments *.

However, allotments are fenced & kept locked. Thus far, the Chad has only run on private, or at least ‘secure’ land!

However, adjacent is a small LNR (Local Nature Reserve) which of course is public, so at  last we can see the brook. BUT – its not the water you can see on the left. The bed of the Chad comes in from the right-hand side of the image, and it practically dry. So where does the water come from? 

Out of this culvert – you can see the large circular pipe in the background. It leads under the gardens of some rather nice houses, and there must be a spring there, which has been diverted into the Chad probably in the 1930s when the houses were built. And currently, following a very dry period the Chad is nearly dry but the spring marches on, so to speak.

This small LNR – The Chad Brook Walkway – is quite deep and would have been impossible to build on, which must have been very frustrating for the house-builders, as this is prime Edgbaston territory!

A very Tolkienish tree. “Almost felt you liked the Forest? Well.. Hoom, hom.” 8^)

We leave this valley up a sloping path which leaves the Chad far below, to enter the culvert that will take it
under Gillhurst Road.

T
This is a view back down into the depths of the valley. Unfortunately, there’s nothing to give it scale – but the central point of the image is probably  40 or 50 yards away, and very steep.

We have now emerged into the yellow circle, crossed Gillhurst Road, and will enter this new heavily wooded area, which covers the route of the old Harborne Branch Line from the L.M.S. (originally London North Western Rly).

This long ramp leads down to the level of the Chad.

The metalled Harborne Walkway can be seen on the left of this image. It’s at the same level as the railway was – but on the right-hand side, a unmetalled path leads down to the Chad, which is much lower. So when the trains ran, you would be looking out over what was then open countryside. The Railway opened in 1874 and passenger services were withdrawn in 1934, well before this end of Gillhurst Road was laid out. Coal traffic continued until 1963.

The Chad appears from its passage under Gillhurst Road. There’s lots of dappled shade,
but the brickwork has not escaped the attention of the graffiti worker!

This little pool is only about three feet wide.

Now looking back the way we came.

Now accompanied by a well trodden path, the brook eventually enters the Pereiera Road Allotments,
which, like Meadow Road cannot be entered without a key. (Dr. Pereira was a well respected physician in Harborne.)

This is end of this section. The middle bit is slightly conjectural, because of the tree cover, and also the fact that the railway was on a very steep embankment at this point. Absolutely nothing can be seen of the Chad on either side. The Harborne Walkway is essentially north – south, under the big band of trees. Just to the right of the word Google you can see the railway bridge.

Here it is from the road, courtesy of Google Maps (by the way, thank you very much, Google!) and no longer looks like this, for it began to sag a bit, and is now braced by steel girders. I was there this morning (2020-09-28), but forgot to get a shot of it. It’s really very good, actually, because the Walkway doesn’t go very much farther south (to the left of the shot), and so a sagging old bridge built in, say 1870, and now unused (except for pedestrians & cyclists) would normally just be demolished & got rid of. And yet, it has been preserved, & braced by custom-made steel arches &c. This was an extremely constructive act on the part of Birmingham City Council, to preserve an old-time aspect of the city. Unless… it was cheaper to shore up the bridge, than to demolish it? Oh dear! How cynical can you get???

Anyway, there it is this morning: 2020-09-29, around 0945. (It’s all in the meta-data 8^)  )

But to return to the ‘Weekin Works’. Weekin may seem a rather uncommon surname, but Ancestry.com has over 900 instances of it, spelled in a wide variety of ways. The Weekin Works website tells us that it began in 1851 as a brickworks, and later became a laundry. In the 1950s it was taken over by the Chad Valley toy company, whose main factory was less than a hundred yards to the south. Later it became a number of small workshops, and indeed I used to get my car taken for its MOT by a mechanic who had a lock-up there. After increasing dilapidation, it was bought by a local businessman and renovated to a high degree, and is now home to many small businesses.

The Chad runs behind the the most northerly edge of the Weekin site, arrowed.

It passes down behind the houses & gardens in Park Hill Road, the last bit of which is North Road – which perversely runs from West to East  8^)  then goes underneath Nursery Road. I’ve assumed it’s probably canalised.

Taken over the Nursery Road bridge parapet looking back towards
Weekin – the Chad curves a little here.

Nursery Road bridge parapet looking north east…

…and the other side, going into the Yateley Road allotments.

I apologise for this singularly pointless image, though I assure you
it is the Chad on its entry to the allotments!

By way of compensation here is a view of the Allotments, though the Chad cannot be seen.

Above is a 30 second video – the Chad needs to cross Harborne Road.

I’m afraid the next few shots are rather fiddly. Behind the giant grass stem, there is a channel which is the first part of the emergency flood relief drain. (Yellow in the video). It’s quite small, as you may judge by the handrails of the steps into it. You can just see the metal bars which stop broken tree branches from clogging it up. We can’t go in closer, because it is within the allotment boundary. The original conduit begins further away and is perfectly invisible from the road, which is on the left of this image.

We have now crossed Harborne Road, and the Chad runs in a concrete trench along the front of about 6 extremely nice houses. Unfortunately, on our first visit, this area was rather smelly, and indeed, ‘three men in a van’ from the Severn-Trent Water board were present. The supervisor actually wished me ‘Good Morning’, which was extremely polite of him, but I thought it best to let them get on with it, rather than engage him in conversation, for as you doubtless aware, I do talk rather a lot.  Ahem!

Now – this is an interesting bit. In the background is the ‘regular’ conduit flowing, and nearer is the emergency relief conduit which was installed 20 or 30 years ago, as, after a big cloudburst, the Chad would overflow & flood the road. Oh, it wasn’t life-threatening – just rather inconvenient. AFAIR, (I moved to Harborne in 1971), it then flooded fairly often – maybe once a year? But since the new drain, only a couple of times since then – but I could be wrong.

Freed of it’s trammels, the Chad meanders away into the grounds of a block of flats, somewhere within which, it descends yet again into an underground culvert. Mind you, it shows no signs of irritability in being consigned again & again, into the bowels of the Earth. That’s a lot more than I can say about myself!

The path of the Chad Brook is commemorated here, though it is only quite a short thoroughfare. There is a number of other, smaller flocks of bats – sorry! blocks of flats – in this vicinity, and I must break off & relate a marvellous thing which happened to me sometime about 1964 or 65. I had put an small ad in the Birmingham Post (the morning paper) wishing to buy ‘old jazz records’, which at the time automatically meant 78 rpm discs – indeed, 78s had only finished in about 1958/59; and they continued to be made for music library purposes well into the 1970s. I had a letter from a retired man who lived in one of these smaller blocks of flats. He had grown up in London, and one day soon after the 1914-18 War, a friend of his said there was a really great band from America he had heard, and they both must go and hear it. It was, of course, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and he became one of the earliest ‘Jazz Fans’, taking up the trumpet and collecting jazz records right through the 1920s until – probably – the 1950s, when he had sold then all to a collector called Pepper (possibly that was Trevor Pepper – but in 2020 there’s nobody left to ask!)  All his 78s, that it, apart from his very favourites – the ones he had bought first. These were the six discs issued by HMV of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. He was an agreeable and cultured chap, and confessed that he had replied to my ad. mostly out of curiosity to see what sort of  person was after ‘old jazz records’. But I had unconsciously paved the way, when I had told him I had got my first LP in 1956, aged 12, which was HMV DLP-1065 : 8 tracks by the O.D.J.B. I only had £3 on me, but that dear kind old man virtually gave me his 6 ODJBs, for at 10 shillings (50p) each, that was very, very cheap indeed, even for 1965. Morever, they were in first-rate condition – all except ‘Jazz Me Blues’ which had a rough start – but then, it always does, it’s so loud! 8^) 

Naturally, I still have his discs, and October 2019, had the privilege of giving a Presentation on the O.D.J.B. to the C.L.P.G.S.** at its Annual Convention in Malvern, it being the Centenary both of the Society, and also the arrival of the O.D.J.B. in England. I made sure to use his discs for the bulk of the musical items, and the images of their labels.

I’m happy to record here, that I have been extremely fortunate in having some very good Mentors in my hobby and professional activities – playing jazz, sound recording, amateur radio &c.; but it is only now, as I wrote the above paragraphs, that the realisation has come to me, that the man who gave me these six records, which, in his letter to me he referred to as ‘the relics of a mis-spent youth…’ was also a very important Mentor! Even though I only met him once, and then only for, perhaps, 10 or 15 minutes! I can somehow, even, remember his name – he was a Mr. Homer.

Incidentally, the two labels above are indeed both sides of the same disc. But ‘Bluin’ the Blues’ has the wartime ‘austerity’ label, with the dog Nipper & the gramophone in sepia; while the other side is from the fresh printing when colour had returned. The Gramophone Co., while being ‘God’s Wonderful Record Label’, were also quite parsimonious – it is said that the brass polish they used for the door handles on their flagship HQ at Hayes, Middx., was not bought in, but made on-site.

One final comment in this interminable digression (sorry and all that), is that Francis Barraud, who painted the HMV dog picture, IMHO almost certainly represented the dog sitting on His Master’s Coffin. Pray consider: the dog is sat on a highly polished wooden surface – the dog is reflected in it. But it’s not the floor of a room – there are no floorboards. What else might it be? OK, a polished dining table? But who the heck ever heard of anybody who would let their dog sit on the ruddy dining table?? No – It’s a coffin. In fact, I have always intended to write a web-page about the matter, so I will put a link here in due course.

Hence, at long length we can return to the Chad Brook. This is the parapet of the ‘bridge’ on Richmond Hill Road. I  put that in quotes because there isn’t a parapet on the other side of the road – so the culvert must end under the road?

And here, the Chad enters and flows down one side the Edgbaston Croquet Club private grounds.
This again is ‘terra incognita’ for the ‘ρολλοι’.
Pretentious, moi?  8^)

Down the southern edge of the Croquet Club, the Chad turns to the south-east and bisects more allotments, the ‘Guinea Gardens’, the rent of which was a guinea a year, or £1.05, which, when these allotments were set up around 1848, was quite a lot of money! As late as 1900, an unskilled factory worker would think themselves lucky if they earned £1 a week. There is a link at the foot of this page telling more about allotments. At the bottom right, the dotted section indicated a subterranean culvert beneath the Railway and the Worcester and Birmingham canal. The canal came first of course – it was begun in 1792, and it would have been relatively simple to lay a pipe or even a brick culvert for the Chad Brook – canals on the Birmingham plateau were always narrow, because the water supply was limited. The railway (The Birmingham West Suburban line) was started in 1876; originally single track with a passing place at Selly Oak, it was soon doubled.

Here, the culvert is shown as a solid line, and while the point of emergence is quite accurate, the straight-line, passing over a moored narrow-boat, can only be conjectural. In the yellow circle, we can finally go and photograph the emergence, because The Vale, which is a Student Village, part of the University of Birmingham, and is open to the public.

A very small and unimportant-looking outlet! We have already said that the Chad has been very low, and actually, on this day, there was a slight flow back into the culvert.

These filters to catch leaves &c., are probably to stop the culvert becoming blocked, because as you will soon sea, the Chad now leads into an artificial lake – one of two Fish Ponds that were in the grounds of a mediaeval priory near here.

After flowing under a bridge, on which I am standing…

…we can walk round the corner and to the other end of the lake, and…

… here is the first of the two mediaeval fish ponds. I dare say both have been much altered. The place is quiet these days because of the Covid lockdown. In Autumn, leaves will fall & float on the lake, and heavy rain might drive water strongly back under the canal and railway & block the culvert – hence the filters we saw above?

Yet another culvert carried the flow southwards under Edgbaston Park Road, and into Edgbaston Golf Club. The course was begun in 1896, and the land was part of the grounds of Edgbaston Hall, originally a moated manor house dating back many centuries. AFAIK, no traces of the early house remain. The current & impressive Edgbaston Hall (which only became the Club House in the 1930s) was built ca. 1717, and the grounds improved by Capability Brown in the 1770s. The Brook enters the very large Edgbaston Pool:

The Chad, probably canalised and re-directed by Capability Brown, actually has two or three paths or channels, in the wooded area to the south of the pool. Maps don’t quite agree with each other here! Perhaps they were some sort of ‘water feature’ that Brown constructed? We’ve just shown one of them.

Here is the parapet of the bridge, or rather tunnel, under the Bristol Road.

The Bristol Road was always very wide, and trams ran in a central reservation. Trams ceased in 1953, so it is rather surprising that only within the last couple of years, has the central reservation been converted to a cycle-way. The Chad Brook emerges, and has now almost ‘run its course’!

Off it goes in a newly landscaped and re-developed area, much of which was the Pebble Mill Studios of the BBC.

The whole area has practically been filled with new modern buildings, including a new Dental Hospital.

A concrete & stone channel pilots the Chad into the Bourn Brook…

The Bourn Brook is on the left. It’s larger than the Chad, because it’s about 4.5 miles long, and also has more tributaries. The direction of flow is of course, from right to left.

Looking west, upstream of the Bourn Brook, complete with ducks.

…and downstream, where the augmented Bourn Brook will go under the Pershore Road.

Shot over the parapet of the Pershore Road bridge – the big building is the new Dental College and Hospital.

It suddenly dawns on me that the parapet on the other side of the
Pershore Road is huge! Beyond it is the Wildlife Conservation Park.

Either the Bourn is askew, or else the Bristol Road is askew. Any odds,
the Brook was theyer fust, so it’s the ruddy Bristol Road as is skewift! ***

We’re now inside the Wildlife Conservation Park, and the channel is completely brick-lined – as is the River Rea, into which the Bourne Brook will soon flow. I suspect the expense of lining the bed dates back to the works done in the 1920s (check this), which put the River Rea into its deep brick-lined culvert – the Rea would break its banks after a prolonged downpour. Such a flood would doubtless flow back up the Bourne Brook. The Pershore Road used to be a ‘Hot Spot’ for Rea floods.

   
Looking North from a bridge…

…and South towards the Rea.

And at last, the Bourn drops over a weir several feet high, which must be intended to stop the Rea coming back up the Bourn, as remarked above, and joins the Rea, which is flowing from right to left along the edge of Cannon Hill Park. There’s a footpath along it. I rode along it many times on my bike, 15 years ago. Well  that’s about it. Thanks if you’ve stayed the whole course. Take care & let’s hope this ruddy Coronavirus thing goes away pretty soon!

* For more on ‘allotments’, see https://www.nsalg.org.uk/allotment-info/brief-history-of-allotments/

** CLPGS = ‘City of London Phonograph & Gramophone Society’. This is, de facto, the British National Society for the study of cylinder phonographs and disc gramophones, and the cylinder and disc records played upon them. It was founded in 1919. For more info, (& believe me, there is a very great deal of it!) go to : http://www.clpgs.org.uk

*** Skewift vs Skewif – local dialect for ‘askew’. In Birmingham it tends to be ‘skewif’; but I was born & grew up in Wolverhampton, all of 13 miles away, where the word is skewift. Old habits die hard…  8^)