Wealthy landlords helped build Brum.

Byline: Carl Chinn 

BIRMINGHAM was one of the greatest manufacturing towns in the world during the 19th century.

Brummies declared with pride that wherever you found man or woman, from the icy wastes of the Arctic to the deepest jungles of Africa, there too would you find Birmingham because even in the most remote regions folk would be using something made in Brum.

A host of industrialists from a variety of backgrounds made their fortune from manufacturing the goods wanted by the world - from Matthew Boulton to Joseph Chamberlain, and from Joseph Lucas to George Cadbury.

Yet for all their wealth, manufacturers like these were not as rich as the families that owned the land upon which houses, shops and factories would be built and through which were cut roads, canals and railways.

The Goughs, later the Gough-Calthorpes, found their treasure not in the production of buttons, brass, pens or the like but in their ownership of most of Edgbaston and part of Perry Barr.

Similarly the Gooch family from Wrentham Hall in Benacre, Suffolk, increased their riches through buying agricultural land in Highgate, Brookfields and the town centre.

Amongst the wealthiest of the landowning families of Birmingham were the Inges of Thorpe Con-stantine in Staffordshire.

Recalled in Thorp Street (strangely it is spelled without the 'e') and Inge Street, they owned much of the city centre through their relationship to the Phillips family.

The Phillips had a long connection to Birmingham and its district. They had land in Erdington from before 1250 and in 1285 an Adam Phelyp served as a juror in the growing market town of Birmingham, which had been founded just over 100 years before.

In the succeeding centuries, each generation of the family seemed to grow more prosperous.

Some 19th century historians state that the Phillips's were 'among the Jewish families who, coming from Normandy at the Conquest, were enabled to purchase land'. Whatever their origins, the Phillips's did very well. In 1426 a John Phelyps was described as a chalonnere, signifying someone who sold a kind of blanket. Birmingham then was a town where the production of cloth was important, and it was through selling such goods that the Colmores also made their fortune.

However, by 1463 a William Fillippes is given as an attorney and 90 years later a William Phillippes is mentioned prominently in a great survey of Birmingham.

William rented land and buildings in Moor Street (then called Molle Street), New Street, High Street, Dale End and elsewhere.

One intriguing rental relates to that of a pasture called Bennetts Hill, for which William paid one rose at the feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist only.

William lived at Earl's Barton, near Wellingborough, but his two sons, Robert and Ambrose resided in Birmingham, as had done their ancestors. They seem to have been the last to have done so. Ambrose inherited the family lands and he is later described as a gentleman living in Walsall. No longer having to work to earn their money, the Philips family had become gentry.

By the early 17th century the Phillips now owned most of the land and dwellings that once they had rented, as well as much of New Street and the Bull Ring.

In 1692 a copy of lease of land from Robert Phillips, then of Newton Regis near Tamworth, to John Jennens named 'Phillips his Street'.

This Phillips Street eventually ran from the bottom end of High Street along the side of the old Market Hall and into Worcester Street.

Robert also held two large pieces of land stretching towards Bull Street called Banner's Croft and the Horse Close.

His wife, Elizabeth, later gave the Horse Close for the building of St Philip's Church, which was consecrated in 1715 and which commemorated her husband' and also for the building of the Blue Coat School, founded in 1724.

The Phillips direct line died out with Robert and through marriage with a female heiress, his lands passed to Theodore William Inge of Thorpe Constantine.

Between 1753 and 1825 various acts of Parliament allowed building on the Birmingham estates. The family continued to own much of Inge Street until 1956, when Mary Caroline Inge sold her properties to pay death duties.

Bordering on part of the Gooch Estate, Inge Street appeared unnamed on a map of 1781.

It was thus a relatively new street when it was home to the young George Jacob Holyoake in the 1820s.

An avowed campaigner for the rights of working-class people and a historian of the Co-operative Movement, Holyoake evoked an almost village-like feeling in his memories of Inge Street.

The grime of smoke, of decay and comfortlessness were not then upon it, rather it was fresh and bright.

From the end of Inge Street the trees of the parsonage of St Martin's 'made a small wood before us, and apparently in their midst, but really beyond them, arose the spire of the Old Church. On summer afternoons and moonlight nights the church spire, rising above the nestling trees, presented an aspect of a verdant village church in the midst of the busy workshop town.'

Inge Street and its district became dominated by shops, back-to-back courtyards and small workshops.

It was known as 'Little Jerusalem' because of the large number of Eastern European Jews who had settled hereabouts. Tailors, glazers, shoemakers and others they were a hard-working, clean and respectable people who had been forced to flee the Russian Empire because of persecution.

As for nearby Thorp Street, it was best known for its barracks, from which many men of the Royal War-wicks went to war in 1914.

Eventually the housing was cleared and Jews and non-Jews moved out.

Inge Street became part of Birmingham's theatre quarter, dominated by the Hippodrome, and now lies on the edge of the Arcadian and the Gay Quarter.

Yet amidst this new Birmingham there lies the last courtyard of back-to-backs in Birmingham.

A National Trust property that harks to the past, it brings to the fore the hardships and vital contributions of all those Brummies who should be remembered as much as the wealthy families of our city.

CAPTION(S):

DUE FOR DEMOLITION... a rare shot of Phillips Street taken in 1958, with the old Market Hall on the right.