Balsall Common

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Balsall Common
Station Road, the main shopping street.
Balsall Common shown within the West Midlands
Population	6,234 (2001)
OS grid reference	SP238771
Metropolitan borough	Solihull
Metropolitan county	West Midlands
Region	West Midlands
Constituent country	England
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Post town	COVENTRY
Postcode district	CV7
European Parliament	West Midlands
List of places: UK • England • West Midlands

Coordinates: 52°23′29″N 1°39′06″W / 52.39141, -1.65169

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

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 (United Kingdom Census 2001), and the parish of Berkswell. As of 2006, the population was approaching 7,000 residents. It also lies on the Heart of England Way.

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 six to twelve 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, three miles (five 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 railway station after Berkswell, 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. This is mainly due to Balsall Common being situated at the heart of the West Midlands greenbelt area known as the Meriden Gap, between Solihull and Coventry, and is thus subject to strict planning regulations. Therefore the village/town has so far not witnessed rapid growth given its location, as residents had long-feared that the village would act as a population overspill centre for Coventry, Solihull and Birmingham.

[edit] Famous residents

Several Premiership and Championship footballers live (and have lived) in Balsall Common, especially those playing with Coventry City, Birmingham City and Aston Villa.