Yardley, Birmingham

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Yardley constituency shown within Birmingham.

St. Erdburgh's Church (Old Yardley Church) within the conservation zone.

Old Yardley Grammar School within the conservation zone.

Yardley is an area in east Birmingham, England. It is also a formal district, managed by its own district committee.

Birmingham Yardley is a constituency and its Member of Parliament is John Hemming.

Yardley has three main primary schools. These are Yardley, Hobmoor and Lyndon Green. It also has two main secondary schools, which are Cockshut Hill and Sheldon Heath. Hobmoor Primary School is set to move to new premises in 2008. The new building is under construction as of February 2007. The present building will be demolished.

Yardley's main shopping area is known as Yew Tree, named after the yew that stood on the roundabout at the junction in the centre of Yardley.^{[citation needed]} It was damaged during work to the roundabout, and ended up having to be cut down. It was later replaced by another tree, which is still growing; however, a local ecologist^{[attribution needed]} claimed that the tree is not a yew but a poplar tree.

Yardley once had a local pub, also called The Yew Tree, which was shut down and set on fire twice. One of the fires caused an adjacent road, Stoney Lane, to be closed to traffic for one day. The pub was later demolished and replaced by a Co-op supermarket and a set of restaurants. A new Yew Tree pub has now opened.

Yardley is not a new town. Yardley is named in the Domesday Book and was referred to as early as 972 in a passage written by monks, who called it Gyrdleah. The parish of Yardley, historically considered part of Worcestershire, became the only parish in the Yardley Rural District under the Local Government Act 1894, and was added to Birmingham and Warwickshire in 1911.^[1] The ancient parish of Yardley included the areas known as Stechford and Hall Green.

Yardley has a Tudor hall called Blakesley Hall and an old church that also dates back to the Tudor period. A sign of its age is a doorway surrounded by Tudor roses and a pomegranate, commemorating the marriage of Prince Arthur, Prince of Wales, to Catherine of Aragon. A sizeable amount of Yardley, called Old Yardley, was granted conservation area status in 1969, becoming Birmingham's first conservation area^[2].

Yardley's nearest train station is Stechford railway station. It is served by many West Midlands buses, most connecting to Birmingham city centre, Chelmsley Wood and Solihull.