472. South West Birmingham And North East Worcestershire.

 

Kings Norton from Bilberry Hill by JRR Tolkien, 8 July 1913.

  To the south and west of the city, Birmingham gradually dissolves into Worcestershire. New Frankley becomes Old Frankley, Rednal becomes Lickey End, West Heath tails off to Hopwood, Kings Norton to Wythall and Rubery to, er, Rubery. In short, suburban Birmingham becomes (mainly) rural Bromsgrove with the Lickey Hills looking down on the surrounding countryside from where JRR Tolkien painted a watercolour on Bilberry Hill looking away towards Kings Norton, the then city distant and brooding, its industry every day threatening to encroach on and overwhelm the agricultural, green lands across the border. 

  In those southwest suburbs when Tolkien was living in Rednal, Herbert Austin was busy establishing his motor car factory at Longbridge and the Cadbury family had established their chocolate factory and had built a model village in which their workers might live very pleasantly unless they wished to consume alcohol which was banned within the boundaries of Bournville village by the Quaker Cadburys.

  Southwest Birmingham is barely recognisable as what we think of as Modern Birmingham. The population is dominated by white people, many of whom arrived there in the nineteen fifties and sixties as the old buildings of the inner city were demolished, in contrast to the population of much of the inner city. It is a mixture of former council estates (many of the houses on those estates were bought by their tenants when Margaret Thatcher introduced the right to buy) and upmarket houses where savvy members of the Birmingham middle class live in houses priced at a fraction of the cost of a similar home in the north of the city at Sutton Coldfield. The residents have all the advantages of living in the city while being close to rural landscapes, just a short walk from home in many cases, as well as cheaper housing. And now those residents of south west Birmingham also have the benefit of being close to some pleasing eateries.

  Recently I had lunch at Kafenion facing Bournville green. It is a busy, sizeable, shabby chic, rustic establishment full, when I went, of the sort of affluent middle class women in early middle age who make up the dominant species in well off-but-socialist Bournville (long gone are the female factory workers who now live in council houses towards the edges of the city). They either had their infants with them, the sort born to ‘elderly primips’, or were luxuriating in their children’s absence at school. It was like a scene from the hilarious BBC comedy, Amandaland. The image of Ladies who lunch has evolved to this new generation of Women who do coffee - with their intensively worked on casual image and their devotion to their mobile phones with much scrolling and texting going on in between the exchange of gossip and oneupwomanship. This certainly is a city of diversity.

    My dining companion, a frequent visitor to Kafenion, and I, who had never eaten there before, were soon settled and studying the paper menu and the blackboard which also listed the dishes on offer. The cuisine is Anglicised Greek or just plain English (with perhaps a little unEnglish spice added). This, in theory, was to be a light lunch and I was very drawn to the spicy (I was warned that it was very spicy by at least a brace of serving staff) curried butternut squash soup which was not only hot in the spicy sense but extremely hot in the temperature meaning of the word. It was very good and the spiciness was not just easily tolerable but also very enjoyable.To accompany the soup I ordered a bowl of excellent chips - crispy outside and soft and digestible inside and made interestingly pleasurable by being sprinkled with sage. There were also a couple of slices of toasted sourdough to mop up the soup.

  My lunch companion ordered an old favourite of hers - Turkish eggs - well poached and spicy and served with an appealing flatbread and she reported that they were very good.

I will have no hesitation to visit Kafenion again when the opportunity arises.

26 March 2025.

Rating:- 🌛🌛🌛.

  In the past twelve to eighteen months, north Worcestershire has gained the excruciatingly excellent Wildmoor Oak Inn (see Blog 454) and in Barnt Green, Andrew Sheridan and his Open Restaurants Group who already have the Michelin-listed Black and Green on the  main street through the village, have opened Cofton on the Green across the road from Black and Green. 

  This is similar to Kafenion in many ways - it acts as a bar for locals and diners with reservations for Black and Green who are waiting for the restaurant to open and serves all-day breakfasts and, an odd pairing, a variety of homemade pizzas. The clientele is similar to that of Kafenion though probably even more well-heeled as Barnt Green is exceedingly affluent (mere mortals in south Birmingham refer to it wondrously as the place where “the footballers live”).

  Regardless, when I and the same lunch companion with whom I visited Kafenion, pitched up at Cofton on the Green, we noted that it was busy, not very sizeable but with outdoors seating, shabby chic, rustic and full of the same sort of clientele as those we encountered in Kafenion, only this being a Saturday, they also had their gaggle of offspring with them though this did not prevent them from paying intense attention to their mobile phones and allowing their next generation to make feral noises or wander around while chewing on some sort of healthy option piece of carbohydrate or the other.

  A young woman, somewhat inarticulate, dropped off a pair of menus at our table and we agreed outr choices and waited for one of the several staff standing at the bar to come and take our order. Eventually, after some minutes, the penny dropped on all sides, and it was revealed to us that one must order at the bar and that way one’s interest in any particular would be registered and in time brought to the table.

  I had a cocktail and we both failed to resist ordering the all day breakfast though I was pulled towards trying one of the pizzas on offer as I suspected they were probably rather good. The breakfast/brunch was very good even at 1.30PM. By the time it reached us, most of the feral children had moved on with their mobile phone-clutching parents and there was only one table left occupied by three women-who-do-coffee  whose cackling was only barely above the level of tolerance. These factors made for a more relaxing lunch than we might otherwise have hoped for half an hour previous.

  These were fine ingredients. The Lashfords sausage, of very good size, was delicious and nicely cooked though the fried egg was cooked so that there was no runniness in the yolk whatsoever. The bacon and hash brown were very tasty but the highlight was the black pudding even if it came at an added price. The cooking of the pudding was perfect, helped, no doubt, by the pudding having plenty of fat in it; it had a  moist but firm texture - too often black pudding is overcooked and cloyingly dry. The twist to this Full English breakfast was that it was served not with toast (which made a truly pleasant change) but with the exoticism of middle eastern flatbread which was also very good. I should not forget to mention that the chopped mushrooms were also delicious and some of the tastiest I have eaten for a long time.

  The choice of dessert is limited and amusingly quirky - a variety of doughnuts - my lunch companion chose the lemon meringue doughnut and said that she enjoyed it. I thought that a milk shake might make a nice way to end the meal and opted for the alluring Malteser flavoured variety. I was disappointed with it - the flavour of chocolate masked the flavour of malt and the milk shake was not anywhere cold enough. 

  My companion and I had enjoyed our visit to Cofton on the Green and again, like Kafenion, I should be happy to return perhaps next time to sample one of the pizzas though a repeat of the Full English, especially if the chef can reproduce the excellent cooking of the black pudding and the mushrooms, would also be very tempting. 

  Cofton on the Green is dog friendly which makes much more sense than letting in a load of feral middle class children spreading which ever virus they have just picked up at school or nursery.

Rating:- 🌛🌛.

12 April 2025.

  In addition to Black and Green in Barnt Green (Blogs 250 and 285), south west Birmingham dwellers also have the opportunity of selecting their choice of fast food at the popular Herbert’s Yard in Longbridge (Blog 201) and the fleshpots of Stirchley and, now trending, Cotteridge which are both just a few minutes away.

125. The Roaring Twenties - Birmingham’s Michelin Three Star Restaurant.

   It’s the early 1920s. The Great War is now a memory albeit a recent one and there is hope that nothing like it will take place on this planet again. The second wave of the great influenza pandemic has burnt itself out. Men home from the war, at least those who have come home, are trying to settle back into ordinary life. Political change is in the air. Those who can afford it would like to have a good time.

  So, here in Birmingham in those early years of the Roaring Twenties where would you go for a slap-up meal? You might turn to A Guide To Birmingham 1924 published by John Bartholomew & Co. which provides a useful list of presumably satisfactory places to dine in:- 

  

Barrow was located in Corporation Street. It was an important establishment in the city having been founded by John Cadbury at 93 Bull Street in 1824 as a tea, coffee and cocoa-selling business and situated next door the shop of his father, Richard Cadbury, who had opened a drapers shop at 92 Bull Street. The business known as Barrows Stores was taken over by Richard Cadbury Barrow. Under the redevelopment scheme put into action by Birmingham’s greatest mayor and political figure, Joseph Chamberlain, a new Street in the town’s centre - Corporation Street - was constructed in the 1870s and cut through Bull Street removing part of Barrows Stores and meaning that the business then became located on the corner of Bull Street and Corporation Street. 

  The old premises were demolished in 1904 and Barrows was then located in a new building with a restaurant on the first floor in part to enable the shop’s customers to sample the tea and coffee on sale. The cafe and restaurant was opened in 1905 and described thus, “The Cafe has large windows overlooking Corporation Street, from which a view of the busy throng below can be obtained. It is elegantly and tastefully furnished, is panelled with fumed oak and lit by electricity”. As the early years of the century passed more cafes and restaurants were added to the Stores to cater for the varying tastes of different customers so that by 1930 there were six - ‘General’, ‘Seasonal’, ‘Adam’, ‘Picture’, ‘Smoking’ and ‘Tudor’. It is not clear which of these is suggested by the list of restaurants published in the 1924 list above.

  In the early 1960s the original buildings in Bull Street were demolished and Barrows Stores moved to a smaller building in Bull Street. Barrows Stores Ltd was sold to a large supermarket chain in 1966. The stores featured in the movie Tolkein about the early life of the author JRR Tolkein, where in his youth,  the writer is depicted as ‘hanging out’ with his close friends who called themselves The Tea Club. The facade is recreated satisfactorily in the movie but unfortunately the film makers chose to film the movie in Liverpool! 

The above list was published in 1924. Pleasingly a couple of months ago I obtained a very decent copy of the 1925 8th Edition of the Michelin Guide Great Britain with its blue cover. Restaurants were described with stars though the meaning of the stars was rather different from today. “In this edition we have indicated a number of restaurants which we can recommend to tourists who prefer such establishments for meals. Unless otherwise stated they are not open on Sundays. As a guide to cuisine, appointments and general accommodation we have divided them into three categories shown thus:- *** Luxurious, well-appointed restaurants, ** Very good restaurants but not with the same luxury of appointments and variety of menu, * Simple but well kept restaurants”

  So how many Birmingham restaurants did the Michelin Guide deign to list in 1925? Well, only one actually. But it did have a three star rating so you could say that it was Birmingham’s first ever Michelin starred restaurant. It was the Exchange located at no 9 Stephenson Place. And it had three stars. There’s many a present-day Birmingham chef would give his right and left arms, both legs and other vital parts of his anatomy to have three stars at this present time. 

 

 The Exchange building was opened on 2 January 1865 and was such a big event that The Illustrated London News featured the grand opening on the cover of its 14 January 1865 edition (see below). The building was located on the corner of Stephenson Place and Corporation Street and among the various facilities there were refreshment rooms which, one assumes, became the sumptious restaurant which Michelin felt to be the only dining place worth mentioning in Birmingham in 1925. Criminally, in the ghastly large scale vandalism which resulted in the wholesale destruction of beautiful buildings in the city which took place in the 1960s to make way for vile brutalistic concrete carbuncles, the Exchange Building was demolished in 1965. We have no knowledge of Michelin’s view of the cuisine served at the Exchange in the 3 decades before it disappeared as no Michelin Guide for Great Britain was published from 1931 to 1974.

  So much has been lost. If you invent a time machine, hop back to 1925 for me and go for dinner at the Exchange and please photograph the dining room for me along with a copy of the menu. Even better, take me with you.