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This is the highest part of the number 11 route, rising to 187 metres above sea level. If you could flatten out the earth and look level, directly east across to the coast of England and over Europe in a straight line beyond Berlin in Germany, you wouldn’t find any land on that line as high above sea level as Bearwood for almost 1,500 miles until you came to a small town called Kokorevka, about 25 miles north of Ukraine, just over the bortder into the Bryansk Oblast district of Russia.
A small part of the number 11 bus route crosses over the border between Birmingham and Sandwell, barely noticeable as the urban landscape stretches for miles around.
The map above, produced by White and Pike Ltd. shows the proposed ward boundary changes of 1911 which saw previously independent and largely rural parishes coming under the control of the city of Birmingham as it needed more land to provide housing for a growing population. In 1911, Aston and Erdington to the north, and Yardley, King’s Norton and Northfield in the south were brough into the City, more than doubling its size. This would increase further in the 1920s and ‘30s with the additions of Perry Barr, Minworth, Castle Bromwich and Sheldon, and then Sutton Coldfield in the 1970s.