Qualla: Solihull

Solihull: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Velela, Public domain. The motto cuts straight to the point: Urbs in rure - a town in the country. Solihull has been telling itself that story for more than eight centuries, ever since the de Limesy family carved a planned village out of the Forest of Arden between 1170 and 1180. The grand old parish church of St Alphege still sits at the head of the High Street, its 168-foot spire visible from miles across the Warwickshire countryside, an anchor that has refused to drift even as Birmingham's conurbation crept eastward and absorbed Solihull into the West Midlands in 1974. Look down today and you see something stubborn: a green-belt borough, three-quarters rural, that gave the world the Land Rover and still arranges for its mayor to ride in one with the licence plate Sol 1.

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Image: User:Velela | Public domain

Solihull: A Hill of Sticky Mud

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brianboru100, CC BY-SA 4.0. The name itself is a complaint. Solihull comes from the soily hill where St Alphege's church was built, a knoll of stiff red marl that turned to sucking mud whenever it rained. The medieval congregation must have arrived in boots and curses. The church they raised on that inconve...

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Image: Brianboru100 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Solihull: Quiet While England Burned

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit planetearthisblue, CC BY-SA 2.0. Solihull has a curious gift for missing the violence that shaped its neighbours. The Industrial Revolution that hammered Birmingham and the Black Country into smoke and iron rolled around the town rather than through it. When civil war split England in the 1640s, armies clashed a...

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Image: planetearthisblue | CC BY-SA 2.0

Solihull: Aluminium, Custard, and a Shadow Factory

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit planetearthisblue, CC BY-SA 2.0. The 20th century finally found Solihull, and the way it arrived was unmistakably industrial. In 1870 the metallurgist James Fern Webster moved to Whitlocks End and worked out how to make aluminium cheap enough to use for ordinary objects, ending the era when bars of the stuff wer...

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Image: planetearthisblue | CC BY-SA 2.0

Solihull: An Airport Called Elmdon

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Snowmanradio, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 8 July 1939, with war two months away, Neville Chamberlain and the Duchess of Kent cut the ribbon at Elmdon Airport. The Art Deco terminal, designed by Norman and Dawbarn, looked like a confident message from a country that still believed in peace. Within weeks the airport was...

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Image: Snowmanradio | CC BY-SA 3.0

Solihull: The Town That Refused to Be Suburb

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian S, CC BY-SA 2.0. Drive in from the M42 and the first thing that registers is how green everything is. Three-quarters of the borough sits inside the West Midlands Green Belt, and Solihull defends that line the way a parish defends its boundaries. The village of Meriden, just inside the borough, wa...

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Image: Ian S | CC BY-SA 2.0