Acocks Green History Society
Maps of Yardley Parish
These maps are extracts from the out of copyright Ordnance Survey six inch to one mile county series from 1886 to 1938. The 1930s edition was a provisional or emergency edition produced before the war, so the drawing of the inter-war estates was sketchy: however this makes them easier to identify. We have not been able to find a full set of maps for north Yardley, but the 1920s state can be deduced by subtracting the sketched in areas from the 1938 edition. After Yardley was absorbed into Birmingham in 1911, some of the boundaries were no longer visible on maps.
Some of these files are large, and may take some time to load. If they still appear to be small, wait a few seconds, then click on the icon that appears at the bottom right of the images. The maps are low resolution, and are not designed for printing but for viewing on screen.
Alan Godfrey Maps sells excellent scaled down reproductions of 25 inches to one mile maps from the early years of the twentieth century. These also have useful historical information on the back. Birmingham Libraries are able to supply quality reproductions of some historical maps in their collection.
The City Council now makes available large scale up to date maps for private use. Go to www.birmingham.gov.uk/maps, then click on View Interactive Maps, partially zoom in then use the Pan tool to find the area you want to look at, then zoom all the way in. Individual houses and plots can be identified.
It is possible to study the changes over the half century covered by the maps by overlaying them on screen. If you download them to your computer, right click on the file, and choose to open with Internet Explorer, you can open each one in a new window, and the area of interest can be lined up on the maps by using the title bars and scroll bars of the windows until the area is at the same position on screen on each map. Using the taskbar to switch between maps then gives the opportunity of seeing at a glance the sequence of development.
The National Library of Scotland website has 25-inch maps up to the 1930s, and 1:1250 and 1:2500 maps up until 1973. There is also an option to compare Edwardian and current maps of various kinds using a slider. For this use the geo-referenced maps option. This is useful for plotting the exact location of changes.
