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Aldridge Road .

A view of the Aldridge Road/Malthouse Lane junction in 1926. This pic is on the Birmingham Library site but is incorrectly captioned as Aldridge Rd/Shady Lane.
AldridgeMalthouse.jpg

Todays view and the two houses in the 1926 view are still there (marked with red spots) but every thing else has changed.
AldMalt.jpg
 
nice pics phil and viv i have been looking for a photo of the old farm for a while...

lyn
 
quite right phil ive just checked...amazing how it looks now...there is a smashing chippy on the right of the modern shot just by the bus stop we use it a lot..im going to show the then one to my kids who all went to perry beeches..they will never guess the location lol

lyn
 
The northern end of Aldridge Rd at it's junction with the Queslett Rd. The Old Horns Pub (new version) can be seen behind the bus. A large queue for a small bus and the driver is busy with 'pay as you enter'. I do not know the exact date but looking at the cars etc I would say late 1960s or in the 1970s.
AldridgeRdQueslettRd.JPG
 
The start of the building of Glenmead School. The houses in the photo are on the Aldridge Road and the block of houses in the right of the view lie just before the junction with Scarsdale Road. Beeches Road is to the left. The houses were originally owned by the First National Housing Trust and families rented them. In the 1950s the FNHT allowed the sitting tenants to buy the houses and some in this pic must have bought them because the FNHT would never have allowed the front of a house to be painted white as seen in the pic.
GlenmeadSchool.JPG
 
phil just shown that pic to our tom and he guessed aldridge road but near the dog track...got the right road but a bit way off...he couldnt believe it when i revealed the location:D he got the right location on post 65 but being a bus driver helped..
 
The new 46 bus route - Colmore Circus to Queslett - was introduced in January 1967. It was the first one-man operated service by BCT and as passenger demand increased the route was operated by similar buses but were double deck. These single deck were initially a replacement for the Leyland PS2's of 1950 but they had a life extension. There were 24 buses in this order and they had 37 seats. They ran on all of the single deck routes of the city and were withdrawn between 1979 and 1981. BON 466 C (fleet no.3466) was new in 1965.
Post 58 of this thread shows four of these buses.
 
Astoness said:
phil just shown that pic to our tom and he guessed aldridge road but near the dog track...got the right road but a bit way off...he couldnt believe it when i revealed the location:D he got the right location on post 65 but being a bus driver helped..
Click to expand...
Hi Lyn, he will know where this is but might not know the bus which was owned by a company called Harpers and the the route went to Brownhills and some on to Cannock.
Phil
HarpersBus.JPG
 
I have this pic elsewhere on the forum and it shows the Beeches Estate being built in 1936. The car is on the Aldridge Road and Green Lane on the right eventually became Greenholm Road.
Beeches_Estate_Being_Built.jpg

linked pic only visible if logged in.
 
Harper Brothers company was founded in 1920 and became quite a large independent operator. In 1965 they were granted a limited stop service in the city boundary which protected the BCT's income.
They were taken over by Midland Red in 1974.
 
Well that bus in #69 is about the ugliest I've seen. Not only that it is about the least happy one I've seen.
No wonders they were taken over.
 
I used Harper Bros a couple of times when I was a teenager to go to a friend's house in Brownhills, and I remember my elder brother advising me to be careful, as Harper's buses were clapped-out semi-wrecks bought from other bus companies. The one on the photo #69 looks very much as my brother described!

G
 
tim eborn said:
Well that bus in #69 is about the ugliest I've seen. Not only that it is about the least happy one I've seen.
No wonders they were taken over.
Click to expand...
That style of bus could be seen all over the UK. They were Leylands (sometimes other engines) with MCW (Saltley) 'Orion' bodies.
May private bus operators ( that is to say outside the BET Federation) relied on others cast offs.
 
This view is labelled Aldridge Road, Perry Barr. Be interesting to find out the exact location on Aldridge Road. Viv.

image.jpeg
 
crikey viv i would not even know where to begin with that one..nice piccie though
 
Vivienne14 said:
This view is labelled Aldridge Road, Perry Barr. Be interesting to find out the exact location on Aldridge Road. Viv.
View attachment 119705
Click to expand...
I've marked two houses with red spots on this aerial view dated 1950. The house near the top of the pic has two chimneys on the gable wall. The house towards bottom right has a two windows in it's gable wall, the left one higher than the right window. Both of these houses can be seen in the pic in post#75 so the men are adjacent to the Birchfield Harriers site, probably just past the Grandstand which may not have been built when the early pic was taken.
AldRd_Viv.JPG
image from 'britainfromabove'
 
I wouldn't be surprised in the houses on the right are still there but the wall, looks a little unsafe, it is well shored up so that has probably gone.
 
Well done and thanks Phil, would never have worked that out from the photo #75. And as is so often the case in these older photos, the men are walking in the road ! No chance of doing this today. Viv.
 
Pic 1 dated 1928 shows the junction with Beeches Road on the left and Old Oscott Lane on the right. The signpost points left to West Bromwich and right to Old Oscott and Maryvale. (from the Birmingham Library collection)
Pic 2 shows Google's street view of the junction.
Pic 3 shows Apple's current aerial view. The building Kwikfit Tyres are using (formerly Co-Op shop) was there in the 1940s as was the Drakes Drum Pub. Brooklyn Tech on the left was built in the 1950s but much extended and since renamed.
Pic 1
ald1928x.jpg
Pic 2
Crossroads.JPG
Pic 3
20171101_073215000_iOS.jpg
 
A Harpers bus on the Aldridge Road ... but this is the Aldridge Road in Streetly and is about a mile east of the Aldridge Road, Birmingham. The building on the left behind the bus is what was commonly known as a 'Tin Tabernacle' and is still there today but is currently occupied by a small printing company.
HarpersBusAldRdStreetly.jpg
 
Nice pic, OM. I live very nearby and know the old 'tin tabernacle' very well. The land at the extreme left of the photo is now flattened out and is farm land (oil-seed rape, great for my hay-fever, I don't think). To the right of the photo, and not visible, would have been the old BIP factory. That bus looks like it's on its last legs....

G
 
Post 84 showing a Harper Brothers, Heath Hayes, bus (fleet No.12) must be dated between February 1957 and November 1967. Harpers buses ran to Kingstanding but did not run into the city centre until 1965. This actually hit Midland Red very hard financially.
This particular bus was new to London Transport in September 1949. It was RT 1479 in their fleet register, being ans AEC Regent with bodywork by Cravens. I ran in the well known red central bus livery until April, 1956 when it was painted green for the Green Line division of LT and entered back in service a month later. It didn't stay in service long as it was withdrawn in July 1957 and was sold to Bird (scrap dealer) of Stratford upon Avon in January 1957.
It soon moved on from there - I guess being ex LT it was in good nick and had recently been painted green (Harpers colours) - in February 1957. Harpers ran it for ten years withdrawing it after accident damage in November, 1967. After that it was used for spares.
 
Image #87 is of the Aldridge Road outside Perry Park entrance. Think it's two ladies and a man riding their bikes. Looks about 1920s. One of the cyclists could even have been my nan ! She lived a little further back up the road (on College Road) in one of the bungalows in the 1920s. Viv.
 
Vivienne14 said:
Image #87 is of the Aldridge Road outside Perry Park entrance. Think it's two ladies and a man riding their bikes. Looks about 1920s. One of the cyclists could even have been my nan ! She lived a little further back up the road in one of the bungalows in the 1920s. Viv.
Click to expand...

About where the cyclists are is where the buses from Kingstanding 29 29a and 33 stopped when we went to the park as kids.

Also somewhere back on this site I mentioned an underground centre down a manhole in the park we found at the war's end, filled with desks and phones, playing with which quickly bought the cops to turf us out. that was just inside the park in line roughly with where the bikers are, I wonder if it's still there.
 
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