Birmingham Back to Backs

For the past 10 years, I've had two lists of National Trust properties. The first of those lists is called "National Trust Places That Serve Scones". 

The second list is called "National Trust Places That Sound Brilliant But Don't Serve Scones And I Have To Visit The Scone Ones First." 

Birmingham Back to Backs, a set of working class houses in the centre of Birmingham, was always very high up on List #2. So when I recently completed all 244 properties on List #1 (read about my final trip to the Giant's Causeway here), I booked my tour slot and set off for the West Midlands.

But before I tell you about the very fascinating Birmingham Back to Backs, I have to correct a previous oversight of mine. 

One of the publications that recently covered the completion of this National Trust Scone Quest was the New York Times. The writer quoted a few lines from this blog, in which I had talked about different types of National Trust visitor. I had mentioned the "Expert Visitor", the one who thinks they know more than the guide and keeps correcting them on details, usually getting on everyone's nerves.

But I had failed to include the very best type of National Trust visitor: the "Lived-It Visitor". These are the people who have first hand experience of what you're looking at, which means they ask brilliant questions or make really insightful comments. They're very rare - you don't often find yourself in a tour group with the current Earl of Lichfield - but when you do bump into one, your entire experience is so greatly improved by their insights that you feel like you should be paying them for sharing their knowledge. My best example is when I went to Souter Lighthouse and met a woman whose husband had grown up in the lighthouse keeper's cottage. 

Anyway: today I was lucky enough to encounter some Lived-It visitors. They hadn't grown up in these specific back to back houses, but they remembered some of what we were seeing, which made it all the more interesting. 

(I have to add, though, that our tour guide had clearly met a few Expert Visitors in her time. She was by far the most knowledgeable and accomplished tour guide I've met at the NT, yet the fear was never far from her eyes that someone was going to question the width of the candles or something similar. It must be quite trying.)

But let me tell you a bit about the Back to Backs:

What are back to backs?

• Back to back courts were a type of urban housing built mainly in the Midlands and the North during the 19th century
• A back to back court features a group of houses built around a central courtyard that contains the shared toilet and laundry facilities
• Back to backs were different to terraced houses. Terraced housing was often made up of homes containing two rooms upstairs and two downstairs. In contrast, a back to back house was usually only one room deep. If you imagine a terraced house split down the middle by a wall, you'd get a back to back - one house looked out onto the street, while the house behind it looked into the courtyard.
• Tenements were different again - they were more like houses split into multiple horizontal dwellings, flat-style, with a shared stairs.

How old are the Birmingham Back to Backs?

Known as Court 15, this set of back to backs had been built by 1831. There were three houses on Inge Street, five on Hurst Street, and three back houses. 

The last residents moved out in the 1960s but the court managed to survive because many of the houses fronting onto Hurst Street had become shops and some stayed in business until the 21st century. 

Who lived in the Birmingham Back to Backs?

Back to backs provided cheap-to-build housing in a city that was rapidly growing. The population of Birmingham was 70,000 in 1801. By 1851 it was over 200,000 and by the end of the century it was 500,000 as industrialisation attracted people from the countryside as well as immigrants. Some back to backs were populated by a certain type of immigrants, becoming a mini Warsaw or a little Roscommon (after the Irish county). 

Today, visitors to the Birmingham Back to Backs see the rooms presented as they would have existed for four real-life families in different eras:

• 1840s: The Levy family was living in Court 15 in 1851, having moved from London. The family was Jewish, and there was a synogogue and a Hebrew School nearby. Lawrence Levy was a watchmaker.

The Levys' kitchen

• 1870s: The Oldfield family moved in during the 1860s and comprised of Herbert and Ann with their 10 children. Herbert was a glassworker, making glass eyes as well as eyes for dolls and stuffed toys.
• 1930s: The Mitchell family lived in Court 15 for 95 years, which is unusual as most families moved around a lot. The Mitchells were locksmiths. 
• 1970s: George Saunders ran his tailoring business from the houses fronting onto Hurst Street. George had come to Birmingham from St Kitts in the Caribbean. He moved out in 2002 and was instrumental in helping to protect the buildings. 

The guide book points out that many other stories exist from other residents, including the intriguing Bunny Bunroe, the fortune-teller. 

Why did these Back to Backs survive?

Even by the 1870s, there was pressure to get rid of the back to backs. They were seen as unsanitary. But removing them was not an easy task - in 1875, almost half the population of Birmingham was living in a back to back. New houses were built, however, and back to backs were emptied and demolished. Court 15 was condemned for domestic habitation in 1966 but it was never knocked down, probably due to the shops that existed on Hurst Street. The Birmingham Conservation Trust took on the properties in the 1990s, with the National Trust taking over once renovations were complete. 

You need to see the Back to Backs for yourself to appreciate how miraculous it is that they've survived. I grew up in a small town with streets of Victorian terraced houses and today I was fully expecting to find myself walking down row upon row of red brick buildings. But it's not like that at all - you're in a world of casinos and modern developments and then suddenly this little pocket of working class housing appears in front of you.

The Birmingham Back to Backs are without doubt one of the very best National Trust properties that I've been to. The property is really well set out and organised so you get a real sense for how the back to backs evolved over the 130 years when people lived in them. My tour guide was excellent - she talked for over an hour an a half, but the time flew by. I highly recommend a visit.

Birmingham Back to Backs: 5 out of 5
Scone: There's no cafe at Birmingham Back to Backs. I did take a Ginger & Treacle scone with me that I'd made myself using the recipe from the National Trust Book of Scones. It's always a winner, as it's a fiery little bake. 

Wightwick Manor

I'm thinking of writing a book called How To Persuade Your Other Half To Visit National Trust Properties. There is an art to it and I believe I have perfected it. Take the conversation I had with the Scone Sidekick about Wightwick Manor: 

Me: I really want to go to Wightwick Manor

Him: Where is it? 
Me: Wolverhampton

Him: <looks aghast> That's MILES away. What's there? 

Me: It's a house built and furnished in the Arts & Crafts style. It has William Morris wallpaper, Pre-Raphaelite art and De Morgan pottery scattered throughout.

Him: <continues to watch The One Show> 

Me: It's the one on the front of the Houses of the National Trust book <holds book up>

Him: Oh alright then

The moral of the story is that EVERY National Trust property has SOMETHING going for it. And Wightwick Manor is very, very photogenic. 

In fact, the book doesn't do Wightwick Manor justice - it is much bigger and much more impressive in real life. Behold my first ever attempt at a panoramic shot on my iPhone:

In 1887, a Wolverhampton paint manufacturer called Theodore Mander bought the Wightwick estate. There had been a manor house at Wightwick for centuries but he decided to build a new house in the 'Old English' style - he had attended a lecture by Oscar Wilde on 'The House Beautiful' and set out to design a home that prioritised the principles of hand craftmanship, both inside and out. In 1893, Mander extended the house to accommodate his growing family. 

Theodore died young - he was only 47. He had married a woman called Flora St Clair Paint (I kid you not) and they had four children. The eldest was Geoffrey and when Flora also died aged 47, he inherited Wightwick.

In 1937, Geoffrey Mander took the extraordinary step of handing Wightwick Manor AND ALL ITS CONTENTS to the National Trust. Initially, it sounds as if the Trust wasn't too keen - the house was less than 50 years old and Victorian architecture and art had fallen out of fashion.

But luckily they did they take it on. Theodore and Flora had created a home filled with features and furnishings from some of the leading lights of the Arts & Crafts movement - William Morris fabrics and wallpaper and De Morgan tiles - and Geoffrey and his wives continued to add to the collection. Today you can find the original Morris furnishings complimented by Rossetti and Burne-Jones artworks. It's amazing. 

In fact, I would go as far as to say that Wightwick has the single most beautiful room in all of the National Trust. It's the Great Parlour and it was designed to look like a Great Hall but with beautiful furnishings. There's even a Minstrels Gallery at the back, but it's actually a useful landing rather than an ornamental feature. This picture doesn't do it justice at all - you need to go and see it.

The Wightwick Scone
But onto the scones. I was very relieved to see a pile of scones at Wightwick, I can tell you - I've had two hits and two misses so far this year and it has shaken my confidence somewhat. 

It was another 'sconus tardisus' this week - like last week's scone at the Wimpole Estate, this week we had another nice-looking scone that turned out to be enormous. It was full of currants and very tasty. 

I've just realised that I don't really have the time to write a book about How To Persuade Your Other Half To Visit National Trust Properties, as I've still got around 150 properties to complete as part of my scone odyssey. Maybe I'll run it as a summer school instead. We'll all meet somewhere lovely for a week in August and eat scones and drink tea. Who's in?

Wightwick Manor: 5 out of 5
Scone: 4.5 out of 5
Great Parlour: 5 out of 5

Other visits I have made in the West Midlands: Dudmaston, Moseley Old Hall, Kinver Edge 

Moseley Old Hall

I'm not having a go at my history teachers here, but I reckon with a semi-decent lawyer and a copy of the Trade Descriptions Act, I could probably sue them. 

I just don't remember history being very well structured at my school. We did the Tudors. We did the Romans. I have a vague recollection of the Spinning Jenny. We did 'Medicine Through Time' but I only remember the bit about sailors sticking amputated limb stumps into boiling tar. And then a term spent on Sino-Soviet relations (WHY?). 

So I went to Moseley Old Hall near Wolverhampton today knowing that I'd probably meet a few toddlers with a better grasp of the life and times of Charles II than I had.

Moseley Old Hall is amazing. It's a really unusual National Trust property, in that it was given one chance of fame and it took that chance, a bit like Susan Boyle or Pippa Middleton. Over the course of two days in September 1651 it went from being just someone's house near Cannock to securing centuries of fame for itself as the place that hid a king with a price on his head. 

The story goes: Charles I was executed in 1649, leaving the hopes of Monarchists on the shoulders of his son, Charles II. In 1651, Charles II marched south from Scotland with an army of 16,000 men to reclaim the throne. However, he was soundly beaten at the Battle of Worcester on 3rd September and was forced to go on the run.

On 8th September he arrived at Moseley Old Hall, bedraggled and tired. On his way to Moseley he had stayed at Boscobel House where he had famously hidden in an oak tree while Roundhead soldiers searched for him nearby (thereby giving hundreds of pubs their name, The Royal Oak). 

Moseley Old Hall had been built in 1600 and was owned by Thomas Whitgreave. Thomas was Catholic and had been hiding a priest, Father Huddlestone. It was in Moseley's priest hole that Charles II spent his first night at the house.

The unfortunate thing about priest holes is that they're not very photogenic. This picture looks like the entrance to someone's not-particularly-interesting cellar. But it is the actual spot where Charles II hid, even though he was 6'2" and a king. Apparently when shown it, he said it was "the best place he was ever in", which makes me really like him:

The second night they allowed him to rest on a bed, and that bed is still there today in The King's Room. However, troops arrived at the house to arrest Whitgreave for being involved in the battle, which he was not, and so the King was forced back into his hidey hole. He then left Moseley to continue on to Bristol, disguised as a servant.

It's a story that would defy belief if you made it up, but it happened and Charles eventually made it to the Continent, thanks to men and women like Thomas Whitgreave.

I love the end of the story too: when Charles II lay dying in 1685, he asked for Father Huddlestone, who gave him the last rites. This is Father Huddlestone's chapel at Moseley:

The Moseley Scone
I was so engrossed in the story that I almost forgot to stop for a scone. The scone at Moseley Old House was very good. If I was being finicky, it maybe wasn't quite as fresh as the other scones I've had lately but it was a nice-looking scone and very tasty. I am sure that Charles would have declared it "the best scone he had ever seen" had he been offered it in 1651.

The only thing that wasn't absolutely brilliant at Moseley was the shop. I've read two great books this year, neither of which I had heard of until I picked them up in National Trust shops, namely A Circle of Sisters from Bateman's and Wedlock from Gibside. We've already established that I am in dire need of education vis a vis Charles II but there were no books on the subject in the shop, which I was really disappointed about. If you're thinking "look, Little Miss Whinge, there's this thing called Amazon?" you are absolutely correct and I've gone there and purchased this.

I will now finish with one of those stories where the person telling it thinks they've had a really spooky supernatural experience and everyone listening thinks 'you just saw something on a shelf'. 

Basically, I spent 20 minutes at Moseley sitting in the sun and mentally berating my useless teachers, asking what kind of education system teaches a British kid about Chiang Kai-Shek but doesn't teach them about the time the King of England hid in a cupboard in Wolverhampton. 

Towards the end of the tour (which was really good, by the way, just as everything at Moseley was really good), was a room containing a chest with this on top: 

To you, this may look like an elderly orange with a ribbon and a load of cloves stuck into it, resting on a bed of pot pourri. But to me it was a voice, a voice from beyond the grave, the voice of Mrs House, my 3rd year junior school teacher, saying "What are you complaining about? Did I not teach you to make a pomander EXACTLY like this in 1983? Does your poor mother not still have it, mouldering away in her home somewhere? You were taught loads of history, you just didn't LISTEN." 

And so, thoroughly admonished by an orange, I went home. 

Moseley Old Hall: 5 out of 5
Scones: 4.5 out of 5
Book purchasing opportunities: 3 out of 5 (I bought a guidebook)

Other visits I have made in the West Midlands: Kinver Edge, Wightwick Manor, Dudmaston