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.
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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.