Edgbaston earned its reputation in the 19th century, when the Gough-Calthorpe family controlled most of the manor and refused to let factories or warehouses be built on it. Birmingham was becoming the workshop of the world, but the Calthorpes kept their estate genteel, leasing villas to industrialists who wanted to live somewhere quieter than the soot and clatter of central Brum. The Domesday Book recorded the place as Celboldistane in the Hundred of Coleshill in 1086, a corruption of an Old English name meaning village of a man called Ecgbald, bold sword. By 1841 the area held sixteen and a half thousand people, drawn by the trees and the absence of furnaces. Locals took to calling Edgbaston the place where the trees begin, a phrase that still gets quoted by estate agents.

For a suburb of just over forty thousand people, Edgbaston has accumulated a surprising number of beginnings. The Edgbaston Archery and Lawn Tennis Society, founded in 1860, is the oldest lawn tennis club in the world. Warwickshire County Cricket Club opened Edgbaston Cricket Ground in 1886 on a meadow leased from the Calthorpes. The Birmingham Botanical Gardens, designed by the great Victorian landscaper J. C. Loudon, opened in 1832. The Birmingham Oratory on Hagley Road was built in 1907 as a memorial to John Henry Newman, the Anglican who became a Catholic cardinal and is now a saint. He had founded the English Oratory community there in 1849, and his rooms can still be visited. The University of Birmingham campus, dominated by Joseph Chamberlain's vast clock tower, fills the southern end of the ward.

J. R. R. Tolkien lived in Edgbaston twice as a boy. After his father died in South Africa and his mother brought the family back to England, they settled briefly in nearby Sarehole, but Edgbaston became his home through his teens. Perrott's Folly and the Waterworks Tower were part of his daily landscape, and biographers have long argued that the pair lodged in his imagination and emerged as Minas Tirith and Orthanc. Tolkien himself was characteristically slippery about literary debts, but he never denied the connection. The towers are still there. So is Edgbaston Old Church, where the rest of his Birmingham was visible through Victorian smoke, and so are several of the houses he knew. Edgbaston Reservoir, once known as Rotton Park Reservoir, sits a short walk away and feeds the Birmingham Canal Navigations.

Edgbaston's blue plaques read like a roll-call of Victorian and 20th-century Birmingham. Neville Chamberlain was born here in a house called Southborne and later represented the area in Parliament. His half-brother Sir Austen Chamberlain, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, lived at 83 Harborne Road. Sir Rowland Hill, who invented the penny post, lived at 146 Hagley Road. Cardinal Newman lived at the Oratory until his death. The militant suffragette Bertha Ryland and the social worker and suffragette Mary Neal both came from Edgbaston, as did Catherine Osler, a quieter campaigner who held her organising meetings at Fairfield on the corner of Hagley and Norfolk Roads. Pink Floyd's drummer Nick Mason and Tony Miles, England's first chess grandmaster, were born in the suburb, and the novelist Barbara Cartland grew up at 31 Augustus Road. Edgbaston Hall, once home to Dr William Withering, the physician who introduced digitalis from foxgloves into Western medicine, still stands.