Category: Places

High Street supermarkets, Solihull

On 25th July 1961, a new Burton’s supermarket opened in High Street, Solihull in the building that is now occupied by the Paramo Lounge and the Works.

Described in the Solihull News, 26th August 1961, as being “the most up-to-date building in Solihull’s old world High Street,” the “colourful” supermarket met with a mixed reaction from shoppers, with letter-writers to the newspaper professing themselves “shocked.” One housewife described the colours of the shop front as “garish and said that the character of the High Street had now been ruined.

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Cheswick Green: the village of the 70s

aerial photograph of Cheswick Green 2007

On 13th July 1969, the first new homes in “the Village of the Seventies” at Cheswick Green were offered for sale by the Greaves Organisation, who built some 550 homes in the village as part of its initial development. The developer had purchased land from around 100 individual owners to enable the redevelopment of a site where around 60 per cent of the existing dwellings, mostly erected since the 1920s, had been deemed unfit for habitation.

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Cedarhurst

It looks as if Cedarhurst, Park Road, Solihull was built in the mid-1890s and was demolished around 1973. A building control plan at the Core Library Solihull (ref.: SOL/PS/1/1/647), dated March 1894, depicts one detached villa in Park Road, opposite Malvern House, which appears to be Cedarhurst, although not named as such.

The plan shows that the property was designed by architect John Henry Hawkes and built by Charles Bragg. The owner was Edward Bottomley, a grocer from Deritend, Birmingham.

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Solihull War Memorial

The unveiling and dedication of Solihull War Memorial in The Square, Solihull, took place on the afternoon of Sunday 19th June 1921 in a ceremony arranged by Brigadier-General Walter Robert Ludlow (1857-1941) whose youngest son had been killed at the Battle of Beaumont Hamel in 1916. This was not the first memorial to the fallen that Solihull parish had erected – a Calvary shrine had been unveiled at Easter 1917.

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“Wayfarer”

Walter MacGregor (“Robbie”) Robinson (1877-1956) was a cyclist and writer from Liverpool. He worked for many years as an official for the Liverpool and London and Globe Insurance Company and lived at Lyttleton Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham from at least 1925 until his death in 1956.

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