Place:Balsall Heath, Warwickshire, England

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Balsall Heath is a working class, inner-city area of Birmingham Metropolitan Borough, West Midlands, England. It has a diverse cultural mix of people and is the location of the Balti Triangle where there is a high concentration of restaurants serving "balti" dishes, a speciality of their Pakistani owners.

Balsall Heath was agricultural land between Moseley village and the city of Birmingham until the 1850s when expansion along Moseley Road joined the two. The area was originally part of the Worcestershire parish of King's Norton, and was added to the County Borough of Birmingham in Warwickshire on 1 October 1891.

Balsall Heath initially had a reasonably affluent population, which can still be seen in the dilapidated grandeur of some of the larger houses. A railway station on Brighton Road (on the Birmingham to Bristol line) led to further expansion, and the end of the 19th century saw a proliferation of high-density small terraced houses.

A Muslim community was started in June 1940 when two Yemenis purchased an artisan cottage on Mary Street. With the mosque being located in the area, more Muslim immigrants began to move into private lodgings in Balsall Heath. Today, Balsall Heath has one of the largest Muslim communities in Birmingham. It is also home to diverse communities from across the Commonwealth.

By the 1980s, many of Balsall Heath's houses were in a dilapidated condition; some still lacked bathrooms or indoor toilets. The local council considered demolishing these properties but chose to refurbish them as part of an urban renewal scheme. Most of these Victorian terraces still exist and, along with more modern social housing, characterise the area today.

Balsall Heath is now divided between two wards in the local constituency of Hall Green. According to the map below in 2010 it was not then a named ward within the constituency.

A nineteenth century description

A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Balsall Heath from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72:

"BALSALL HEATH, a chapelry in King's Norton parish, Worcester[shire]; on the Birmingham and Gloucester railway, 2½ miles S of Birmingham. It was constituted in 1853; and it has a post office under Birmingham. Population: 7,651. Houses: 1,616. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Worcester. Value: £300. Patron: the Vicar of King's Norton. The church is ancient."

[edit] Birmingham constituencies and wards Birmingham Metropolitan Borough or Birmingham City Council is the largest local government body of its type in Europe. In an attempt to devolve responsibility for the management of local services away from the centre, ten local districts were established, one for each of the UK parliamentary constituencies that cover Birmingham. Since 2004 each of the constituencies is managed by a Constituency Committee, made up of all the councillors for the wards in that constituency. At the start of this arrangement, each constituency had four wards, but the number of wards now varies and is more dependent on population and population density. Most of the wards are neighbourhoods that were established as civil parishes in the mid-19th century, although some of them are suburbs which evolved during the 20th century. Birmingham absorbed a number of sections of the surrounding counties of Worcestershire and Staffordshire during the period 1890-1931. This shows up in the full placenames of some of the modern wards. The place descriptions "Constituency" and "Wards" only refer to the era since 1974 when a place was part of Birmingham Metropolitan Borough. Similarly, references to County and Municipal boroughs, and Urban and Rural districts, only concern the years 1894-1974 when these types of local government were in place. There is a page in WeRelate for each of the constiuencies and wards shown on the map.

Research tips

• GENUKI main page for Warwickshire provides information on various topics covering the whole of the county, and also a link to a list of parishes. Under each parish there is a list of the settlements within it and brief description of each. This is a list of pre-1834 ancient or ecclesiastical parishes but there are suggestions as to how to find parishes set up since then. GENUKI provides references to other organizations who hold genealogical information for the local area. There is no guarantee that the website has been kept up to date and therefore the reader should check additional sources if possible.
• Warwickshire and West Midland family history societies are listed in GENUKI.
• The FamilyTree Wiki has a series of pages similar to those provided by GENUKI which may have been prepared at a later date and from more recent data. The wiki has a link to English Jurisdictions 1851. There is a list of all the parishes in existence at that date with maps indicating their boundaries. The website is very useful for finding the ecclesiastical individual parishes within large cities and towns.
• A Vision of Britain through Time, Warwickshire, section "Units and Statistics" leads to analyses of population and organization of the county from about 1800 through 1974. There are pages available for all civil parishes, municipal boroughs and other administrative divisions. Descriptions provided are usually based on a gazetteer of 1870-72 which often provides brief notes on the economic basis of the settlement and significant occurences through its history.
• The two maps below indicate the boundaries between parishes, etc., but for a more detailed view of a specific area try a map from this selection. The oldest series are very clear at the third magnification offered. Comparing the map details with the GENUKI details for the same area is well worthwhile.

• Map of Warwickshire illustrating urban and rural districts in 1900 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown.
• Map of Warwickshire urban and rural districts in 1944 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown. This is not a repeat of the first map. There were a number of changes to urban and rural district structure in the 1930s.

• A map of the ancient divisions named "hundreds" is to be found in A Vision of Britain through Time. It shows the detached sections of Warwickshire as they were in 1832. These detached sections have now been moved into the counties that surrounded them.
• As of October 2016 Warwickshire Parish Registers, 1535-1984 are available to search online on FamilySearch
• As of September 2018 TheGenealogist has added over 1.5 million individuals to its Warwickshire Parish Record Collection and so increases the coverage of this Midland county for family researchers to find their ancestors baptisms, marriages and burials. These records are released in association with Warwickshire County Record Office and have the benefit of high quality images to complement the transcripts, making them a valuable resource for those with ancestors from this area. These are available to Genealogist Diamond Subscription holders.
• The website British History Online provides seven volumes of the Victoria County History Series on Warwickshire. The first (Vol 2) covers the religious houses of the county; Volumes 3 through 6 provide articles the settlements in each of the hundreds in turn, and Volumes 7 and 8 deal with Birmingham and Coventry respectively. References to individual parishes will be furnished as time permits.
• The Balsall Heath Local History Society has a website outlining their local activities. The link to the image based collection titled Digital Balsall Heath leads to another website called Birmingham Images where one can select photos from a database of more than 11,000 images covering the whole of Birmingham from the 19th century through to today.