Quinton, Birmingham

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Quinton is a suburb on the western edge of Birmingham, West Midlands, England. It is a Birmingham City Council ward within the Edgbaston formal district, and forms a part of the Birmingham Edgbaston parliamentary constituency.

Quinton borders on the Birmingham suburbs of Harborne and Bartley Green and the Black Country area of Warley, and is separated by the M5 motorway from the Black Country town of Halesowen. It covers an area of 4.8 sq km; its population was recorded in the 2001 UK census as 19,798, though its boundaries have since expanded slightly. The eastern parts of it were formerly known as Ridgeacre, with Quinton or "The Quinton" being the area now around the church.

The Old Quinton area in the west of Quinton contains the highest point in Birmingham, and the top of the spire of the (Church of England) Christ Church is the highest point of any building in Birmingham. It is rumoured locally that the next highest point due easterly lies in the Ural mountains. The escarpment a little to the west also forms part of the national watershed.

Before the Church was built, it was part of the ancient parish of Halesowen and was largely owned in medieval times by the wealthy abbey at Lapal near Halesowen. The parish was generally known as Ridgacre until 1901, and formed, with the most of rest of Halesowen parish, a detached part of Shropshire until 1844.[1]

Though this area (including the Christ Church and its associated primary school) dates back to the Victorian era, and Quinton was formally removed from Worcestershire and incorporated into the county borough of Birmingham, in Warwickshire, on November 9th, 1909, it remained in character a village rather than a suburb until the large-scale housing development of the 1930s. The expanded Quinton of that time was fictionalised as "Tilton" by Francis Brett Young in his novel Mr & Mrs Pennington. It then became with the rest of Birmingham, part of the metropolitan county of West Midlands in 1974.

Much of Quinton's housing consists of medium-sized semi-detached houses from this period. There is a concentration of low-rise council housing on the Woodgate Valley estate, and higher-rise blocks on the Welsh House Farm estate, though this was designated until 2004 as part of Harborne. The area is almost entirely residential, though there are typical small local service businesses and an office park has recently been developed on the Quinton Meadows site adjacent to the motorway.

The largest open space is Woodgate Valley Country Park, through which the Bourne Brook flows, dividing Quinton from Bartley Green.

Quinton ward is presently represented by one Labour and two Conservative councillors on Birmingham City Council.