Birmingham Public Lighting/Public Works Dept, Curzon st.

[rover]

1966-1970 fitter. All gone now cannot find any trace. (Just another memory!)

 

[Morturn]

I remember the Public Works Depot in Curzon Street. I think the Public Works department was absorbed into the City Engineers Depot maybe late 70's (?). Public Works looked after all the communal spaces, loos etc. There was also the Birmingham Council fleet maintenance depot on the same site.

 

[NannyBrum]

My dad worked at Curzon street was on street light maintenance . He worked on lights in the Queensway tunnel and Spaghetti junction .

 

[rover]

I remember the Public Works Depot in Curzon Street. I think the Public Works department was absorbed into the City Engineers Depot maybe late 70's (?). Public Works looked after all the communal spaces, loos etc. There was also the Birmingham Council fleet maintenance depot on the same site.

Thanks for that i wondered what happened to it all. I used to work with with the millwright Albert Mills ...he had a son who worked on the service & maintenance of all the PWD vehicles, and one of the welders was a George Pritchard and a character named Billy Bates used to service and maintain the bicycle fleet. the general stores was managed by a Ken Gray along with his son, and the general workshop manager was a guy called Wally Winters with Bernard Smith as administrator. one of the electrical maintenance electricians was a Les Findon.....

 

[v60pdb]

Just after I left school in1963 I worked on the construction of The Depot for Public Lighting in Curzon St. For Morris and Jacombs the builders in HobMoor Rd Small Heath. I was just a humble assistant to the Quantity Survey on site. They had just broken ground when I started. If you remember, it was one of the coldest winters on modern record. The ground was frozen down to a depth of over 3ft (900mm or so) and had to be excavated with pick axes and rock drills.
Of course, the first thing the groundworkers did was to rip up any disconnected electrical services, burn off the insulation and sell the copper to the local Tat man. Not forgetting the lead water pipes and those for the old gas lamps.
We were digging through old cobbled roads and some cellars of old housing ( Birmingham back to backs). It wasn’t until recently, some 60 years later, I discovered some of my relatives lived in those very houses.

 

[Time Traveller 66]

The entrance to the Public Works Depot was in Cardigan Street in which ended up rightly as rover said City Engineers Department. Fleet Maintenance looked after Council vehicles the yellow livery Housing vehicles Parks department Social services vehicles Gritting lorries . Plus the depot housed Street lighting department until it moved to Park Road to make way for Millennium Point.

 

[rover]

Shame the Public Lighting Depot & buildings had such a short life so modern all new buildings/stores/canteen & offices, large fleet vehicle car parking... the depot had relocated from Cambridge street to Curzon street just before i started in 1965...Progress eh ! oh and not forgetting Dirty Dora's cafe as we called it in Cardigan street just up on the right past the turning for Gopsal street, it was Dora's terrace house front room with tables & chairs 3 in total if i remember which filled the room along with waist level cigarette smoke and brown/red sauce bottles which always seemed to have at least an inch of crusty dried out sauce over the openings blocking the flow never a bottle top in sight... Yellow egg stains and splashed dried out sauce and spilled tea marks along with a half full ash tray in the centre of tables to help secure the permanent fixed table cloths.
But the best crusty bread bacon/egg sarnie & largest tea stained mug of tea in brum ...and we used visit plenty of others over the day....lol