CONTEXT 178 : DECEMBER 2023 17 BUILDINGS IN THE COUNTRYSIDE a monumental example of Birmingham’s civic architecture placed in a rural setting. Built in Ruskin-influenced Venetian gothic, the waterworks has a tall central hall, with rose windows and turrets, that forms a powerful landmark beside the railway. Across the tracks, and in complete contrast, is Peggs Barn. The barn is a medieval box-frame cottage that looks like a relic from the landscape familiar to George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), born at Arbury Hall near Nuneaton in 1819. That impression would be right, but its story has an extra layer of interest. The barn was dismantled in 1985 at its site at Daw Mill Colliery, about 1.5 miles to the south east, and moved to Whitacre Heath as a community building project managed by Coleshill and District Civic Society. It served as a scout hut until 2008 when it was sold for residential use.1 Near Peggs Barn, a patch of woodland, donated by a local benefactor and managed by the parish council, forms part of a matrix of habitats that interlaces with the built element of the landscape in the way described by Richard Mabey. Train passengers through Whitacre can glimpse herons, buzzards, little egrets and tufted ducks or, for the particularly sharp-eyed, a kingfisher, particularly at the confluence of the Cole and Blythe rivers. Electricity pylons, signature urban-fringe structures, provide nesting opportunities for peregrines. Whitacre and Coleshill are at a nodal point in the national motorway network; the intersection of the M6, M6 Toll and M42: and the landscape is shaped by transport infrastructure. The central geographical position offers the maximum reach within a lorry driver’s time limits for a working day. This makes the area a key location for the distribution park. For Farley and Symmonds Roberts these are tranquil places favoured by driving instructors for early lessons. But the complexes of huge boxes, in colours matching the sky or woodland, are dramatic landscape features: for some an ugly intrusion, or a giant abstract artwork, or both. The town of Coleshill, about a mile south of Whitacre, was a coaching stop on the road from London to Chester. It still retains elements of the time before it was bypassed in the 1830s by the Holyhead Road through Birmingham and the Black Country. Across the valley of the River Cole, to the west of the town, Coleshill Park was the home of the Wingfield-Digby family. Gatehouse towers from the earlier house, scarred by civil war artillery, were excavated as part of the archaeological dig preceding the construction of HS2, along the eastern edge of the park. A large ornamental garden was also excavated and the excavations were featured on the BBC’s Digging for Britain. The Wingfield-Digbys built a new house to the north of the historic site in 1872–73, commissioning John Middleton of Cheltenham as 1 The author is grateful to Jennifer Leadbetter, Heritage and Conservation Officer with North Warwickshire Borough Council, for this information. Whitacre Waterworks: monumental civic architecture in a rural setting Peggs Barn, a 17th-century Warwickshire Long House, was re-erected on its current site in 1989.
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