Birmingham and the Counties
In the present day, Birmingham is a metropolitan borough, part of the West Midlands Metropolitan county. However, it was not always this way. Birmingham has expanded so much that different parts of the city lie across different historic counties: Warwickshire, Staffordshire and Worcestershire. These historic counties represent much older ways of dividing up the land, each with their own distinct origin.
Warwickshire
Erdington, Aston, Edgbaston and Sutton Coldfield have all historically been part of the county of Warwickshire. Warwickshire began as part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia around the year 1000. The earliest reference to the area is in 1001 when it appears as Wæringscīr. It is perhaps most famed as the birthplace of one of the world’s greatest playwrights, William Shakespeare.
In the Victorian era, Warwickshire saw its size increase steadily. As the population of Birmingham expanded, more and more towns and districts came under Warwickshire’s borders. In 1891, Harborne became part of Birmingham, so was transferred from the county of Staffordshire to Warwickshire. By 1911, Handsworth and Yardley, as well as King’s Norton and Northfield became parts of Warwickshire rather than Worcestershire. This was also because they became parts of Birmingham. This was a part of the Greater Birmingham Scheme, as Birmingham’s City Councillors sought to take on responsibility for all the areas that had become suburbs of their city.
Staffordshire
The land that makes up the historic county of Staffordshire includes many important towns and cities: from the Cathedral city of Lichfield to the much larger Stoke-on-Trent.
Originally, Staffordshire was divided up into five different sections, called ‘hundreds’. These were Cuttlestone, Offlow, Pirehill, Seisdon and Totmonslow. These broke the land up into smaller areas, each with a different local leadership responsible for them. These steadily became less important over time. In 1553 Queen Mary made Lichfield a ‘county corporate’, so it was organised separately from the rest of the county. By the 1600s Staffordshire was instead divided between Urban Districts and Rural Districts, and the ‘hundreds’ were no more.
We have already seen how Staffordshire gave up Harborne to Birmingham in 1911. In 1928 Perry Barr was also ceded to Warwickshire to become part of Birmingham.
Worcestershire
Worcestershire, much like Warwickshire, was once part of the Kingdom of Mercia. It began as the early Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the Hwicce, before being absorbed into Mercia as the kingdom expanded in the 600s. The area known as Worcestershire was formally established in 918, using land owned by the Bishop of Worcester, Pershore Abbey, and Evesham Abbey. Before this, the area was dominated by burhs. These are walled towns installed by the King of the Anglo Saxons (Alfred the Great), to defend against Norse invaders from Denmark and Norway.
By the middle of the Victorian period, Worcestershire was managed by the Courts of Quarter Sessions. These met four times a year (hence the name!) and were responsible for keeping law and order in the county. This meant setting taxes, maintaining bridges and highways, and licensing alehouses.
This would change with the local government act of 1888. Now Worcestershire County Council were responsible for managing the area. It was at this time that Worcestershire started losing land to the ever-growing city of Birmingham, as Balsall Heath (now home of the famous ‘Balti Triangle’) became part of Birmingham on 1 October 1891. When Birmingham, Coventry, Solihull and Sutton Coldfield became a part of the West Midlands county in 1974, and Birmingham itself was made a Metropolitan borough, the old borders between Warwickshire, Staffordshire and Worcestershire mattered less. Today they remain a throwback to how much the West Midlands has changed over the centuries.