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Newhall Street

Streets in Birmingham, West MidlandsUse British English from August 2017
Newhall Street Birmingham
Newhall Street Birmingham

Newhall Street is a street located in Birmingham, England. Newhall Street stretches from Colmore Row in the city centre by St Phillip's Cathedral in a north-westerly direction towards the Jewellery Quarter. Originally the road was the driveway to New Hall occupied by the Colmore family. New Hall was demolished in 1787 after being vacated by the Colmores and used as a warehouse by Matthew Boulton. Newhall Street was so named in 1766, after opening as a public street in 1746 called Newport Street and then New Hall Walk. The streets on the estate were named after the children of the family. A number of telephone exchanges have existed on the street: the 1896 Bell Edison Telephone building, Telephone House (still an exchange), the Cold War Anchor Exchange underneath it, and Brindley House (now renovated into an apartment block).

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Newhall Street (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Newhall Street
Newhall Street, Birmingham Ladywood

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N 52.483 ° E -1.905 °
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Birmingham Central Telephone Exchange

Newhall Street 104
B3 1JX Birmingham, Ladywood
England, United Kingdom
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Newhall Street Birmingham
Newhall Street Birmingham
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Anchor telephone exchange
Anchor telephone exchange

Anchor Exchange was an underground, hardened telephone exchange built in Birmingham, England. Construction commenced in 1953 under the guise of building an underground railway. It opened in September 1957 at a cost of £4 million. It was located nominally on Newhall Street. However its network of tunnels extended from at least the Jewellery Quarter to Southside.It originally formed one of a network of 18 zone switching centres within the UK telephone system that provided trunk switching facilities within its own charge group and to group switching centres (GSC) within an area broadly comprising the West Midlands and central Wales. The exchange formed part of the trunk mechanisation plan commenced in 1939 to permit operators from originating GSCs to dial through to a distant UK subscriber without requiring further operator intervention. Later, it was additionally used to switch subscriber dialled trunk calls after its introduction at Bristol in 1958. It was subsequently augmented and superseded by a transit switching centre (TSC) equipped with a crossbar switching system (TXK4) which formed part of the transit network. It parented two of the first three GSCs at Worcester and Wolverhampton to go live when the transit network was inaugurated in 1971 which eventually provided universal UK automatic subscriber dialling and was completed in 1979.The Anchor telephone exchange tunnels are still used to house communication cables. They have been updated with firebreak compartments and hazardous asbestos has been removed. They are continually pumped out because of the city's rising water table.The exchange took its name from the hallmark of Birmingham Assay Office, which depicts an anchor.

Birmingham Assay Office
Birmingham Assay Office

The Birmingham Assay Office, one of the four assay offices in the United Kingdom, is located in the Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham. The development of a silver industry in 18th century Birmingham was hampered by the legal requirement that items of solid silver be assayed, and the nearest Assay Offices were in Chester and London. Matthew Boulton and Birmingham's other great industrialists joined forces with silversmiths of Sheffield to petition Parliament for the establishment of Assay Offices in their respective cities. In spite of determined opposition by London silversmiths, an Act of Parliament was passed in March 1773, just one month after the original petition was presented to Parliament, to allow Birmingham and Sheffield the right to assay silver. The Birmingham Assay Office opened on 31 August 1773 and initially operated from three rooms in the King's Head Inn on New Street employing only four staff and was only operating on a Tuesday. The first customer on that day was Matthew Boulton.The assay office is managed by a board of 36 "Guardians of the Standard of Wrought Plate in Birmingham", between six and nine of whom must be connected with the trade. The hallmark of the Birmingham Assay Office is the Anchor, and that of the Sheffield Assay Office was the Crown. A story about the origins of this hallmark goes that meetings prior to the inauguration of both Birmingham and Sheffield Assay Offices in 1773 were held at a public house called the Crown and Anchor Tavern on the Strand, London. It is said that the choice of symbol was made on the toss of a coin which resulted in Birmingham adopting the Anchor and Sheffield the Crown (which was changed in 1977 to the White Rose of York).Services provided by the office include nickel testing, metal analysis, plating thickness determination, bullion certification, consultancy and gem certification. Platinum was brought within the Hallmarking Act 1973.

Queensway, Birmingham
Queensway, Birmingham

Queensway is the name of a number of roads in central Birmingham, England. The name most often refers to the Queensway tunnel, part of the A38. However the name is also used as a suffix of several other roads and circuses, such as Smallbrook Queensway and Colmore Circus Queensway; all of these were once part of the historic A4400 Inner Ring Road, which was often called collectively the Queensway. The Inner Ring Road (i.e. the Queensways) were built as dual carriageway major roads in the 1960s and 1970s. Junctions on the road were largely grade separated, with pedestrians kept physically separate from vehicular traffic and most junctions allowing vehicles staying on the road to pass over or under those using the junction. It is now widely regarded as one of the classic urban planning blunders of the 20th century. Although seen as a revolutionary improvement when the first section opened in 1960, the 'Concrete Collar', as it became known, was viewed by council planners as an impenetrable barrier for the expansion of the city centre. In particular, it became unpopular with pedestrians who were required to use subways at the roundabouts. According to the Birmingham Big City Plan published in 2011, the Ring Road has restricted open spaces, growth and economic activity. It has also made the city centre more crowded and harder to navigate.After 1988, the city council sought to recreate links between the city centre and the neighbouring areas, enlarging the city centre and improving the pedestrian environment across the city, with an emphasis on shifting vehicular movements out to The Middleway. The Inner Ring Road was effectively dismantled by the 2000s - many roads have been rebuilt and downgraded and now far more resemble city streets.