Rowton House Birmingham: the History of 145 Alcester Street, Highgate

At 145 Alcester Street in Highgate stands a large red-brick block that most people walk past without a second look. It opened in 1903 as a Rowton House, one of a small group of Victorian and Edwardian lodging houses built on a deliberately unusual principle, and it is Grade II listed today.

The principle was privacy. Ordinary common lodging houses of the period put men in open dormitories, and the Rowton model gave each resident a separate cubicle instead, for sixpence a night.

Birmingham's could take around 819 men, and kept a tailor, a barber and a shoemaker working on the premises.

Although a locally formed company put the Birmingham house up, it engaged Harry Bell Measures, the architect behind the London Rowton Houses, so the building follows the pattern established in the capital.

The foundation stone was laid on 23 June 1903 by Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, which gives the opening an unusually precise date.

What the plan reflects is the intention behind it. This was not a shelter designed only to keep men out of the weather; the trades on site existed so that a resident could keep himself presentable enough to look for work. The cubicles were the physical expression of the same idea.

The building's second life was as the Paragon Hotel, under which name it traded for decades and became a substantial conference, event and accommodation venue for this part of the city. That is the name attached to the address in most directories, and the reason two apparently unrelated searches both lead here.

It has since returned to trading under the Rowton name, so the block on Alcester Street is still in commercial use as a hotel rather than preserved as a heritage site, so there is no public tour of the interior, though the exterior is plainly visible from the pavement on Alcester Street itself.

For a visitor, the practical upshot is simple. The building can be seen properly only from outside, and the best view of its red-brick frontage is from the opposite pavement on Alcester Street. It is a short walk from the Bull Ring markets, so it fits easily into an afternoon spent on foot around Digbeth and Highgate.

Highgate sits a short distance south-east of the Bull Ring markets, on the edge of Digbeth and within walking distance of the centre.

The area has changed considerably since 1903 and is changing again now, with Digbeth's studios and the Curzon Street works reshaping the streets immediately north of it.

For anyone interested in how Birmingham housed the people who built it, this block belongs among the city's surviving historical buildings, alongside the Back to Backs. One preserves how families lived in a court of small houses; the other shows what the city built for men who had no household at all, and no address to give an employer.