Warwick Bar

The Warwick Bar conservation area is a conservation area in Birmingham, England which was home to many canalside factories during the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It is named after the Warwick Bar stop lock joining the Digbeth Branch of the Birmingham Canal Navigations and the Warwick and Birmingham Canal (later the Grand Union Canal). The stop lock was installed to separate the water systems of the competing canal companies, while still allowing boats to pass.

Warwick Bar Conservation Area covers an area of 16.2 hectares (40 acres) where the Birmingham-to-London Grand Union Canal meets the Digbeth Branch Canal. It was designated such status on 25 June 1987. It covers the entire length of the Digbeth Branch Canal through the Eastside area and a section of the River Rea. To the south is the Digbeth, Deritend and Bordesley High Streets Conservation Area.

The conservation area includes three of the statutorily listed buildings in Birmingham, each built by the canal company in the 1840s and 1850s, and a locally listed canal warehouse built in 1935. In total, there are five listed buildings and six locally listed buildings. One locally listed building, the former Co-op furniture factory works (1899) on Belmont Row was destroyed by fire on 11 January 2007 in a suspected arson attack. Seventy-five percent of the building was damaged by a fire which caused the roof to collapse and which also destroyed seven arched windows. On 18 January 2007, the façade of the building, which had survived the fire albeit smoke damaged, collapsed in on itself in high winds owing to the lack of support it received after the fire had been put out. This building had been due to be redeveloped as part of the Ventureast regeneration project.

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