Stratford House: Birmingham’s 400-year-old survivor

National World - LocalTV

Stratford House in Camp Hill, Birmingham, is a 17th-century half-timbered building with a rich and unexpected history. From surviving wartime bombs and demolition attempts to housing a record label and even a swingers’ club, this landmark has seen it all. Discover its fascinating journey through the centuries.

Transcript

00:00So Stratford House is at Camp Hill in Birmingham. Camp Hill, named Camp Hill just because of the

00:10family that owned the land here which were the Kemp family but it's also associated with the

00:15civil war in Birmingham and some people think it's called that for that reason. But what you

00:20can see behind me is a half timbered or a black and white house which was finished in 1601 for

00:28Bridget and Ambrose Rotten and we know that because they carved their initials in the

00:35beam above the front door which is quite touching really and it's had an amazing history.

00:42It survived for hundreds of years, Network Rail tried to demolish it, they wanted to use it as

00:49a sidings for the local railway yard and then tried again in the 1950s to destroy it. Fortunately

00:57that didn't happen. It was narrowly missed by bombs during the second world war that fell nearby

01:05and now we have this fantastic building that it's really hard to see because it's surrounded by

01:11roads and I think that's really very Birmingham thing about it. So Bridget and Ambrose Rotten,

01:17when they got married they came to live here and there were 20 acres of land and they kept

01:23animals and it's hard to imagine that now because of the road system that's been put in.

01:29In the 1980s it was home to a musical instrument repair company, it then became home to Network

01:38Records, one of the really important publishing companies that bought house music from Detroit

01:45into Britain. In 2015 it became a swingers club called the Tudor Lounge and they held what were

01:53called leather and lace parties here, there was even a dungeon in the cellar. I would have liked

01:59to have been here the night it was robbed, armed robbers broke in and apparently swingers in all

02:06kinds of states of undress spilled out onto the main road and it would have been quite a sight.

02:13The same year there was a fire here and the whole of the inside of it was gutted.

02:18Fortunately the owners spent a fortune on repairing it, the whole interior was replaced

02:26and it's still here today for us all to see. One of the interesting things about it, it had what

02:31was called an insurance plate on the outside of it. It used to be that if your building caught

02:39fire the local fire service would come out. If you had an insurance plate they'd put the fire

02:45out for free, if you didn't, probably very much like the AA or the RAC,

02:51they'd negotiate on the spot for a fee before they would put the fire out.

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