17 Weirdest and Most Forbidden Streets in Birmingham

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]Birmingham has erased more of its own history than almost any English city outside London. These are the 17 weirdest and most forbidden streets in Birmingham.

[00:00:12]Stick around for number one. It is a street being erased right now, anchored by a building that has been locked since before most of your parents were born.

[00:00:21]Keren Street sits at the edge of Digbath where the city center starts giving way to the east side development zone.

[00:00:29]From the pavement, you can see the neocclassical entrance hall behind the hoardings. Two stories of pale stone columns, grade one listed and locked to the public since 1966.

[00:00:41]That building opened in 1838 as the Birmingham terminus of the London and Birmingham Railway. Before New Street Station existed, before the city had a proper rail network, Keren Street was where passengers from London arrived. It was the gateway into Birmingham, designed to make an impression on visitors who had never seen a railway terminus before. Scheduled passenger trains stopped using it in 1854 when New Street took over.

[00:01:09]The station carried on for freight and other uses, but the grandeur was gone.

[00:01:15]By 1966, when it closed completely, most of the original platforms and train shed had been demolished.

[00:01:22]The entrance building survived because it was too significant to pull down and too expensive to restore.

[00:01:29]The plan now is to fold Kerzon Street into the new HS2 station development with seven platforms and the old building as the centerpiece of the new terminus.

[00:01:39]But HS2 delays mean the building will stay behind that fence until at least the 2030s.

[00:01:47]Britain's oldest surviving mainline station entrance sitting in a construction site waiting for a project that has not broken ground yet.

[00:01:57]Keep that in mind because we are coming back to Keren Street at the end of this list. Needless Alley connects New Street to Temple Row, a narrow passage running north past the back doors of restaurants and a perpetual collection of rubbish bins.

[00:02:13]The name is older than any of the businesses on the street. older than most of the buildings it passes and nobody alive can tell you with certainty where it came from. There are two theories that local historians keep returning to. One holds that needle makers worked the area in the 1700s and gave the alley its name.

[00:02:35]The other holds that the alley was notorious for disorderly houses, the Georgian era polite term for brothel, and that the name is a pun on what was being sold there.

[00:02:47]The Birmingham Journal, writing about the street in the Victorian era, called it needless by name and needless by nature.

[00:02:56]Their meaning was that the street was disorderly and unnecessary, a blot on the city center.

[00:03:02]The city tried to clean it up during 18th century redevelopment schemes aimed at clearing vice from the city's back lanes. Streets like Needless Alley were closed off and absorbed into larger plots.

[00:03:16]The alley survived those attempts.

[00:03:19]It is still there today, still narrow, still running between the same two points it has connected for centuries, and still carrying a name that two separate generations of historians have not been able to pin down.

[00:03:32]Stand at the new street end on a quiet afternoon and the name feels correct.

[00:03:37]It should not really be there.

[00:03:40]Nobody's quite sure why it is. Watery Lane was a central part of Small Heath at the turn of the 20th century.

[00:03:47]Real streets, real buildings, real people, and the real territory of the gangs that would later be romanticized as the Peaky Blinders.

[00:03:56]The TV series put the Shelby family's headquarters on Watery Lane.

[00:04:01]And for once, the writers were not making up a location.

[00:04:06]The gang was there.

[00:04:08]The street was real. It is not real anymore.

[00:04:13]In the 1960s, Herbert Manzone's middle ring road cut through the area.

[00:04:19]The planners needed land and watery lanes buildings were workingclass housing in a working-class neighborhood.

[00:04:26]The kind of street that planning departments of that era found easy to clear.

[00:04:32]The houses came down.

[00:04:35]The street got absorbed into the new road scheme. What survives is a name, Watery Lane Middleway, a slip road off the middle ring road in Bordersley that carries the original name like a footnote. If you drive it today, you will see traffic signals, concrete barriers, and the kind of infrastructure that exists purely to keep vehicles moving. None of the buildings that stood on the original watery lane are there.

[00:05:01]The street the real Peiquey Blinders walked is a ring road. Old Inkleys and New Inkleys appear in the 1851 census records for central Birmingham. That is the last reliable evidence that these streets existed as inhabited places.

[00:05:17]They sat somewhere between Bull Street, Edgebaston Street, and Small Brook Street. Two streets in the dense, overcrowded heart of the city, packed with the kind of back-to-back housing that Victorian reformers described in language somewhere between horror and disgust.

[00:05:34]Disease moved through streets like the Inkley Fast. Cholera, typhoid, and tuberculosis were not abstract threats in a neighborhood like this. They were recurring events. The courts off old Inkleys and new Inkleys would have been dark, narrow spaces with shared privies and wells too close to open drains.

[00:05:55]The reformers who campaigned for clearance were not wrong that the conditions were lethal. They were simply less interested in rehousing the people who lived there than in removing the buildings.

[00:06:06]The Inkleys were demolished during the 19th century redevelopment of the city center.

[00:06:11]The area was cleared, reorganized, and eventually swallowed by the expansion of Birmingham's commercial district.

[00:06:18]A century later, the Bull Ring Shopping Center went up on top of what remained.

[00:06:23]There is no plaque on the Bull Ring's exterior wall, indicating that thousands of people once lived and died on the land beneath it. No marker, nothing.

[00:06:33]The Inkleys simply stopped being on the map, and the map moved on.

[00:06:38]Steelhouse Lane runs through the legal district of Birmingham City Center, connecting the courts and the old police lockup that sat opposite them.

[00:06:49]The West Midlands Police Museum now occupies the lockup building, which operated from 1891 until 2016, 125 years of holding some of the city's most dangerous and most desperate people in the same stone cells.

[00:07:06]Among the people held, there were real members of the gangs that inspired Peaky Blinders. The lockup was the right building in the right neighborhood at the right time.

[00:07:15]Small Heath and Borders were a short distance away. The cells on Steelhouse Lane received what the streets produced.

[00:07:23]Below street level, there is a tunnel connecting the lockup to the court building across the road.

[00:07:29]the passage through which prisoners were moved from one side of the legal system to the other without having to appear on the street.

[00:07:38]The tunnel is said to be one of the most haunted places in Birmingham.

[00:07:43]People who have walked it on guided tours describe it in the kind of language that experienced tour guides learn not to dismiss.

[00:07:51]A pressure in the air, a feeling of being watched in a space where nothing can be watching you. The lockup building is open as a museum. The tunnel is only accessible on guided tours booked in advance. Most visitors to Birmingham do not know it is there.

[00:08:08]Long Nuke Road is in Northfield, B31, a residential suburb in the south of the city. It's a perfectly ordinary street, terrace houses, parked cars, the quiet hum of suburban South Birmingham.

[00:08:22]The name should be unsettling.

[00:08:25]It sounds like a cold war planning document, a classified route to somewhere the government does not want you to find. The name predates the nuclear era entirely. Nuke is a corruption of an old English place name.

[00:08:39]The kind of phonetic drift that happens over centuries when spoken words outlast the people who first said them. Whatever the original name referred to, it had nothing to do with nuclear weapons. The road got its name before nuclear weapons existed.

[00:08:55]Before nuclear physics existed, before the word nuclear had the meaning it carries today.

[00:09:02]Tourists photograph the street sign regularly. Locals have stopped finding it funny. The people who live on Long Nuke Road, B31, get their bins collected on Tuesdays and go to the same Tesco as everyone else in Northfield.

[00:09:16]The Froggery is not a street name that survived.

[00:09:20]It is one that was deliberately killed.

[00:09:23]The area around what is now Small Brook Queensway and Brmsgrowth Street was known for centuries by this name. A reference to the marshy, poorly drained ground where the wells were said to be full of frogs. In the 18th and 19th centuries, this was where Birmingham's worst slum sat. courts packed in on courts, drainage running into drinking water, mortality rates that local newspapers cited as evidence that something had to be done. The something that got done included erasing the name.

[00:09:57]Victorian urban reformers understood that place names carry reputations and the froggery's reputation was the kind that stuck to everyone who lived there. Calling an area the Froggery was shorthand for calling its residents worthless, diseased, and beyond help.

[00:10:15]When the buildings came down, the reformers made sure the name went with them. Today, the Boring Shopping Center and the entrance to New Street Station sit on top of where the Froggery used to be. Shoppers walk through the John Lewis entrance on the approximate footprint of streets that house thousands of people who were removed from the map along with their neighborhood.

[00:10:38]The frogs are gone. The wells are gone.

[00:10:39]The name itself was buried as a public health measure.

[00:10:44]In the spring of 1890, a man went into the Rainbow Pub on Adelie Street in Bordersley.

[00:10:51]He had a few drinks. When he left, a group of men followed him and waited until he was in a lonely part of the street near two bridges before attacking him. The assault turned up in the local press two weeks later.

[00:11:04]The newspaper described the attackers as the small heath peiquey blinders. That news report is the first time the name Pey Blinders appeared in print anywhere.

[00:11:16]The street where it happened, Adelie Street, runs between Dig Beth and Bordisley Station, passing under a set of railway bridges that were there in 1890 and are still there today. The street is still recognizable from the 1890 newspaper description.

[00:11:34]The bridges are still bridges. The street is still quiet under them.

[00:11:39]Walk Adly Street now and you will find a working industrial road, warehouses, small businesses, the occasional vehicle pulling in and out.

[00:11:50]Nothing commemorates the attack or the newspaper report. There is no blue plaque marking the spot where a gang earned its name.

[00:11:59]The street does not know it is historically significant. It just goes about its business under the same railway bridges it has had for over a century.

[00:12:09]If you are finding this useful, drop a comment below letting us know which of these streets you have walked past and hit subscribe because there are more of these coming.

[00:12:21]Warstone Lane Cemetery opened in 1848 in the jewelry quarter.

[00:12:26]The designers solved a practical problem with an unusual structure, a two-tier semic-ircular catacomb system built into a raised terrace at the center of the grounds.

[00:12:38]The catacombs were designed to accommodate more burials than the land area could otherwise support because Birmingham was growing fast and the dead were accumulating faster than the earth could receive them.

[00:12:51]The cemetery closed to burials in 1982, but the catacombs remain.

[00:12:57]You can stand at the entrance to them on a visit to the cemetery.

[00:13:01]You can't go inside.

[00:13:03]Jewelry quarter workers, some of whom have worked the same streets for decades, tell a story about a woman in 1930s clothing who has been seen walking through the cemetery.

[00:13:15]She walks through the walls. The sightings come with a specific sensory detail. A smell of pear drops.

[00:13:22]In the jewelry quarter, pear drops carry a specific meaning because potassium cyanide was used in the gold and silver plating processes that built this part of the city's economy.

[00:13:35]The smell is there in the living industry as well as in the ghost story.

[00:13:40]Whether you take the story literally or not, the detail is worth sitting with.

[00:13:45]The jewelry quarter is a place where the toxic and the beautiful have always sat next to each other. Where the process of making something valuable involves chemicals that can kill you. And the ghost story captures that without trying. The woman in gray is still reportedly seen. The catacombs are still sealed. Spies Close is in Quinton B32.

[00:14:08]It's a short culde-sac off a residential road.

[00:14:12]This is the kind of street that has a single row of houses and a turning circle at the end. The houses are postwar semi- detached with driveways and wheelie bins lined up outside.

[00:14:24]The street sign says spies close.

[00:14:27]Locals photograph it regularly and send the pictures to friends overseas.

[00:14:32]The name sounds like a cold war thriller. The kind of street where a handler meets an asset in the gray drizzle of a Birmingham evening to pass information about troop movements.

[00:14:44]In reality, Spies Close is named after a local family or landowner whose surname happened to be Spies. The same way Brown's Green in Hansworth Wood is named after someone called Brown.

[00:14:57]The gap between the name and the street is the entire point.

[00:15:01]Birmingham has dozens of street names that carry enormous weight, while the actual street beneath them carries none at all.

[00:15:10]Spies Close is the most concentrated example of that gap, and by any reasonable measure, it is the most dramatically named ordinary street in the West Midlands.

[00:15:21]Spicil Street has been in and out of existence several times under several different names.

[00:15:27]The version that exists today is a kind of archaeological survivor.

[00:15:32]A small pedestrian stub near St. Martin's Church in the Bull Ring area that carries the name of a street that was once the commercial heart of the city.

[00:15:42]In the 16th and 17th centuries, the area around what is now the B ring was where Birmingham's markets operated.

[00:15:50]The street that became Spicel Street was then called Mercer Street, reflecting the cloth trade. By the early 18th century, it had been renamed Spicer Street, then Spicel Street, as the grocery and meat trade grew and the name drifted with it. By the end of the 18th century, this was one of Birmingham's most important commercial streets, lined with stalls, shops, and the constant activity of a working market town center.

[00:16:19]The bull ring redevelopments of the 20th century took most of it. The original Spicel Street is buried under the successive layers of Birmingham's commercial district, the concrete of the 1960s bull ring, the glass and steel of the 2003 bull ring, and the current pedestrian infrastructure.

[00:16:41]What survives with the name attached is a short pedestrian section beside the church. A few dozen meters long carrying the identity of a street that once ran through the most active part of the city.

[00:16:54]Pinfold Street runs from Victoria Square towards Stevenson Place. A short connecting street that most people use as a throughway between the bus stops and the city center.

[00:17:06]The word in the name is medieval.

[00:17:09]A pinfold was the parish pound, the enclosure where stray livestock were held until their owners arrived to pay a fine and collect them. Every medieval parish had one. If your cattle wandered off the common land and someone caught them, they went into the pinfold until you came to retrieve them. The fee for getting them back went to the parish.

[00:17:31]Birmingham's pinfold disappeared centuries ago. The building is gone. The function is gone. The livestock are gone and the whole economic structure that made a pinfold necessary is gone.

[00:17:46]What survived is the name on a street that runs past the council house and under the shadow of the town hall, one of the most formal and civic stretches of the city center.

[00:17:57]Medieval livestock impoundment in the heart of Victorian Birmingham. The name outlasted everything it described by several hundred years.

[00:18:07]Garrison Lane runs through Small Heath close to St. Andrews, Birmingham City's ground in the kind of working-class neighborhood that has held its character through a century of economic change.

[00:18:19]The pub on the corner of Garrison Lane and Witten Street is called the Garrison Tavern. The real Pey Blinders drank there. Before filming started on the TV series in 2013, the production crew took Selian Murphy to the Garrison Tavern so he could get a feel for where the gang actually operated.

[00:18:39]The pub had been closed for some time by then, not a functioning venue, just a building with a history.

[00:18:46]Murphy stood on Garrison Lane and took in the geography.

[00:18:51]The following year in May 2014, the Garrison Tavern sold at auction for £183,000, £20,000 above its guide price. A Victorian pub in Small Heath, directly associated with the gang that had become one of the BBC's most successful dramas, sold for less than a new build flat in Harburn.

[00:19:13]The people who eventually bought it restored the building, and the garrison reopened in 2025.

[00:19:20]For most of the TV series 6 season run, The Real Garrison Tavern sat closed on a quiet street with tourists arriving to photograph a locked door.

[00:19:31]The show about it was watched in 180 countries. The building it was based on sat empty in small heath.

[00:19:41]Brown's Green is a small residential area in Hanssworth Wood, B20, named after a 19th century landowner called Brown.

[00:19:51]The name is Oxmoronic.

[00:19:54]Brown's green is the kind of combination that sounds like it was generated by a committee that could not quite agree on anything. It evokes the color brown and the concept of a green space in the same breath, as if the place is arguing with itself.

[00:20:09]The contradiction is accidental.

[00:20:12]There was a man called Brown. He owned land that included a green. The land was developed and named after him. Nobody in the 19th century was trying to be funny.

[00:20:23]Brown's Green today is a small leafy area in North Birmingham, a residential neighborhood like dozens of others in the outer city.

[00:20:31]The name gets photographed by visitors who find the combination amusing.

[00:20:36]Locals do not find it amusing anymore.

[00:20:39]They have been living with the name long enough to stop noticing it.

[00:20:43]The most contradictory street names in Birmingham are usually somebody's surname.

[00:20:49]This is one of those cases where knowing the explanation makes it slightly less interesting, which is exactly how Birmingham works.

[00:20:57]Cotton and Cotton Street were cleared in 1884.

[00:21:01]They ran off Fasily Street in the area close to the old bull ring and they represented a piece of Birmingham's economic history that the city had already moved beyond by the time the demolition crews arrived.

[00:21:15]The names tell you what the streets were. Cotton trade streets connected to a textile economy that Birmingham developed in the period before the city committed itself entirely to metal work.

[00:21:28]By 1884, Birmingham had pivoted. The cotton trade that gave these streets their names had been superseded by the manufacturing that would define the city for the next century.

[00:21:40]The streets themselves were cleared as part of the ongoing reordering of the city center that had been running since the 1870s. New infrastructure needed new land. Cotton Street and Cotton Row were in the way. What is there now is the East Side development zone. industrial units, car parks, the infrastructure of Birmingham's ongoing reconfiguration of its eastern districts. There is no signage for Cotton Street, no trace of Cotton Row. The clearance in 1884 was total, and the 140 years since then have only confirmed it. The names survive in local history databases and in old directories held by Birmingham archives.

[00:22:23]In the built city, they are gone.

[00:22:27]Jamaica Row ran from the bottom of the bull ring south towards Sherlock Street, a street in the commercial heart of Birmingham with a name that carries the weight of a specific historical relationship.

[00:22:40]Jamaica as a place name in an English city reflects the trading networks that connected Birmingham's manufacturing economy to the colonial world.

[00:22:51]Sugar moved through the ports. Rum moved through the ports. The goods that Birmingham's factories produced moved into that same trade network. Birmingham wasn't a slave port, and the city had no docks. But the wealth generated by the transatlantic trade in enslaved people moved through the economy of industrial Britain in ways that touched manufacturing cities as readily as port cities. Merchants in Birmingham dealt with merchants in Bristol and Liverpool who were funding and profiting from plantations.

[00:23:24]The name Jamaica Row is a fossil record of that connection. A street name that marked without explanation or apology.

[00:23:32]The trade link that the street's commerce was built on. The 20th century bull ring redevelopments took Jamaica row. The street was demolished along with the other historic market streets in the area, replaced by the concrete structures that defined Birmingham's postwar approach to its city center. The name exists now on old maps, in directories from the 19th century, and in the memories of residents old enough to remember when you could still find the street name on a signpost. Nobody under 60 in the city recognizes it. Park Street and Digbath was partially closed in 2018 when HS2 demolition work began in earnest. The plan had been announced for years. The new HS2 terminus would be built at Keren Street, the old 1838 station at the edge of Digbath and the surrounding streets would be cleared to make way for the development. Park Street sat in the footprint of that plan. The Fox and Grapes pub was knocked down first. Then came the Eagle and Ton.

[00:24:37]The Eagle and Ton had been a fixture on Park Street for over a century. UB40 filmed the video for Red Red Wine there.

[00:24:45]The pub had hosted live music, local bands, and the kind of regulars who made up the social fabric of Digbath before the area became a destination. The pub served its last pint on January 4th, 2020.

[00:25:01]In October of that year, the demolition crew arrived and by the end of the day, the building was rubble.

[00:25:08]Local residents and preservation groups called it horrific vandalism.

[00:25:13]The building that HS2 promised to replace it with still has not been built. This is where the list comes back to where it started.

[00:25:23]Kerzon Street opened in 1838 as the gateway into Birmingham from London and it has been behind a fence since 1966.

[00:25:32]HS2 was supposed to transform it into a functioning terminus again. The old station restored seven new platforms.

[00:25:40]the eastern end of the country's largest infrastructure project. The delays keep extending the weight. The fence stays up. The building stays locked. And around it in Digbath, the streets that gave the neighborhood its character are coming down one by one, clearing space for a project that keeps moving its own start date. Birmingham has been doing this for two centuries. Building, clearing, building again, with the previous version always disappearing a little faster than the new one arrives.

[00:26:10]Park Street is the current proof of that. The construction holdings will be there well into the 2030s. Behind them, the city is in the middle of another erasia, same as always.

[00:26:23]Birmingham has hundreds of streets with stories like these, erased, locked, strangely named, or quietly falling apart behind a fence. This list is 17 of them. If you want more, subscribe because there is a lot more of this city's hidden history where that came from.