Becoming Glebe Farm

The Walters family occupied what later became Glebe Farm from the middle ages. The family disappear from the records by 1517 and then John Sutton is shown as holding the dwelling house, adjacent buildings and adjoining lands.

It is thought that Walters Farm occupied the site of an ancient manor house where there was a moat and fishponds. Moats provided isolated farms with protection from wild beasts and robbers and were also a source of water or somewhere to deposit sewage and rubbish.

The site of Walters farm is linked by a straight road to Yardley Old Church. This indicates the antiquity of the site and also its probable importance in the local area.

In 1883 Walters Farm was owned by Matthew Boulton. It was made over to the vicar of Yardley ‘In lieu of Vicarial tithes’. It then became known as Glebe Farm, with ‘Glebe’ meaning land belonging to or yielding profit to the church.

The farm was finally demolished during the 1930s and Glebe Farm Council Estate was built. The last tenants of the farm were the Clift family. Norah Clift has written about her memories of her childhood on the farm and you can read about her life at Glebe Farm Library.

To the east of Glebe Farm, Cole Hall Lane occupied the land which became the Sewage Works. During the 1930s when Glebe Farm estate was being developed over 1,360 houses were built making it one of the biggest in the city. Some evidence of the area's wooded past exist in local road names such as The Riddings which means a plot of lands cleared ready for cultivation.