Balsall Common

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Station Road, the main shopping street of Balsall Common

Balsall Common is a large village and one of the larger rural settlements in the Metropolitan Borough of Solihull , situated between the cities of Coventry 7 miles (11 km) to the east and Birmingham 13 miles (21 km) to the west, to which it serves as a commuter village in the West Midlands. It is currently undergoing rapid suburbanisation and is increasingly considered as a minor town in terms of its population.

The village is split between the civil parishes of Balsall (which also includes Balsall Street, Temple Balsall, Fen End, and Chadwick End, and has a population of 6,234 (2001 census), and the parish of Berkswell. As of 2006 the population was approaching 7,000 residents.

The village is of recent origin; most of the houses and shops were built in the 20th century. Previously, the village consisted of a couple of hamlets of about 6 to 12 houses each and a few scattered cottages - as this map of 1889 shows. In the 1930s there began the development which linked these isolated buildings, but it was not until after World War II that the village really began to grow. With its proximity to the village of Meriden, 3 miles (5 km) away, Balsall Common is close to the precise (though much-disputed) geographic centre of England and thus is one of the furthest places from the UK coastline. The local secondary school is unsurprisingly named the Heart of England School.

It is served by a railway station on the Coventry-Birmingham line. The station is called Berkswell after a much older, and now smaller, village to the north (now essentially a suburb of Balsall Common). It has two schools, one primary and one secondary. Nearby towns and villages include Solihull, Kenilworth, Warwick, Meriden, Hampton-in-Arden and Hatton.

Since the late-1990s, plans for a bypass, a large national supermarket and larger swathes of new housing have so far been circumvented.