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Tamworth Leasing

Did You Know?

The stone memorial in St Editha’s church to Tamworth doctor John Clarke contains an error. The carved memorial to the famous physician, who lived at Wigginton Lodge, states that he died in 1818, when in fact he passed away in 1815.

Legend has it that when Reliant founder Tom Williams from Tamworth built his first prototype car in his garden shed he found that the finished vehicle was too big to fit down the narrow entry next to his house. With the help of engineer Ewart Thompson, the car was taken apart before being reassembled on the roadside.

The effigy of King Offa on the west facade of Lichfield Cathedral depicts the Mercian monarch holding a bishop’s mitre. This is because the Tamworth-based king made Lichfield the seat of an archbishop in 786.

Tamworth once had two town halls. For centuries the town was split in two – half being in Warwickshire and half in Staffordshire. A Staffordshire town hall stood on the site of the Three Tuns pub, in Lichfield Street. It was pulled down in 1700. The current town hall, was originally the town hall for the Warwickshire side of Tamworth.

Although Tamworth was not directly targeted by Hitler’s bombers during the Second World War, a number of bombs were dropped on the town. In 1940 six high explosives dropped in the Fazeley Road area, 25 incendiary bombs fell near the railway station and 50 more of these fire-starting devices near Alders Mill.

At the junction of George street, Bolebridge Street and Colehill there was once an area known as the Bull Ring, suggesting that blood sports such as Bull fighting and bear baiting were once popular in Tamworth.

In 1949 the chief librarian of Tamworth decided to remove chairs from the Corporation Street library’s reading room to stop “old gentlemen from snoozing and drying their ‘smalls’ on the radiators.

It’s not very often that you get the chance to get close to real, valuable buried treasure and look back in time to the 6th century, when Tamworth was the Ancient Capital of Mercia, one of the three kingdoms that ruled the county.

Founded by Thomas Guy in 1678. Following his rejection by the people of Tamworth in 1708 for election to parliament, before his death he excluded residents of the town from the Almshouses, a restriction which still stands today.

The Globe now stands proudly on Upper Gungate and is Tamworth’s finest example of the pub palaces erected by the breweries during the tied house war of the late Victorian era and was built at the tail end of the pub rebuilding boom of 1886-1901.

The first Grammar School stood on this site for nearly two hundred years from 1668, with five decorative ‘Ionic’ style pilasters adorning the front. Demolished in 1867, four terraced brick cottages were built on the foundation of the old school. In the 1970s arches were added to the shop fronts, yet the decorative tops of three of the five original Ionic pilasters, as well as the stone Fleur de leys seal dating from the original 1668 building.

Constructed in 1886 with a resplendent bell tower at a cost of £2250. The first ‘Methodist’ to visit Tamworth was none other than John Wesley himself, following the notorious Wednesbury riots in 1743.