Solihull calls itself "a town in the country", and the motto still fits: a pedestrianised, sandstone-church high street sits inside greenbelt to the south and east, while the built-up expanse of Birmingham presses in from the northwest. It reads as a market town that grew a shopping centre and a car plant rather than a suburb that grew a centre, and that older identity is still visible in the street pattern around St Alphege church even as Touchwood and Mell Square do the modern retail work.
What stands out
- A genuinely old market-town core — chartered for a weekly market in 1242, its high street still runs past the 13th-century St Alphege church — wrapped around contemporary shopping at Touchwood and the 1960s-built Mell Square.
- Home to Land Rover's main production plant, plus a cluster of newer headquarters (Arup's regional office, Gymshark, Lounge), giving the town an industrial identity well beyond commuting distance to Birmingham.
- A packed calendar of long-running local traditions — a farmers' market every first Friday, a carnival dating to the early 1930s, an annual CAMRA beer festival and a bonfire-night fireworks display — organised through clubs like the Round Table and Rotary rather than one-off events.
Trade-offs
- Solihull School, Eversfield Preparatory and other well-known independent schools sit close together here, but proximity is not an offer of a place — each sets its own admissions and assessment, and living nearby changes nothing about that.
- The town borders Birmingham but is not a Birmingham neighbourhood in scale or character: it is a distinct market town with its own council and identity, and comparing the two directly undersells how different a day here feels from a day in the city centre.
- Name recognition — Land Rover, Jack Grealish, Richard Hammond — outruns how the place actually feels day to day, which is quieter and more suburban than the associations suggest.
Things to know about Solihull
- Jack Grealish, the Manchester City and England footballer, was brought up in Solihull.
- Richard Hammond was born and raised here, and Top Gear filmed an episode with Hammond, Jeremy Clarkson and James May testing classic sports cars in a Solihull car wash.
- The steam locomotive used as the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter films, GWR 4900 Class Olton Hall, is named after the former Olton Hall estate in Solihull.
- Land Rover's main production plant is here — the town has built every four-wheel-drive Land Rover and Range Rover since the model line began.
- Peaky Blinders sends Tommy Shelby to a hotel in Solihull to meet aristocrat Diana Mitford in its sixth series.
Life here
- The pedestrianised High Street runs past the medieval St Alphege church toward the Touchwood shopping centre and the older, open-air Mell Square.
- A farmers' market is held on the High Street on the first Friday of every month.
- Solihull Carnival has run since the early 1930s and, with the town's newer summer festival, uses Tudor Grange Park as its venue, alongside a free bonfire-night fireworks display organised by the local Round Table.
- The town hosts an annual CAMRA beer festival, and the National Exhibition Centre nearby stages the Crufts dog show and the Horse of the Year Show every year.
- The Core Theatre and Solihull Arts Complex, a Cineworld, a symphony orchestra founded in 1990, a professional ballet school and a Morris dancing side (Silhill Morris) all operate in the town.
History and what it is known for
- Solihull was founded around 1170–1180 as a "planted borough" by the de Limesy family, offering free tenure to attract settlers — the origin of its motto, "Urbs in rure", town in the country.
- The manor received a royal charter for a weekly market and annual fair in 1242, and by the 14th century the High Street was known as a blacksmiths' street, le Smythestret.
- Unlike nearby cities, Solihull largely missed the Industrial Revolution and stayed a small market town until the 20th century, when housing development drew in new residents from across the UK.
- Elmdon Airport opened here in 1939, later becoming Birmingham International Airport (technically still sited within the Solihull borough, not Birmingham).
- Triumph built motorcycles at Meriden, in the borough, from 1942 to 1983, and a 1936 shadow factory in Solihull became the Rover, later Land Rover, plant after the war.
- Metallurgist James Fern Webster, working at Solihull Lodge from 1870, developed a process that made aluminium extraction cheap enough for everyday use, at a time when the metal had been treated as precious.
Notable connections
- Jack Grealish — Manchester City and England footballer, brought up in Solihull.
- Richard Hammond — broadcaster and Top Gear/The Grand Tour presenter, born and brought up in Solihull, attended Solihull School.
- Tony Iommi — Black Sabbath's guitarist, lives in Solihull.
- W. H. Auden — poet, grew up on Homer Road in Solihull.
- Nigel Mansell — Formula 1 world champion, attended Solihull College.
- Felicity Kendal — actress, born in Olton, Solihull.
On screen
- Top Gear — series 15 filmed an episode in Solihull, Richard Hammond's home town, in which the presenters tested classic sports cars' waterproofing in a car wash.
- Peaky Blinders — in series 6, Tommy Shelby meets aristocrat Diana Mitford at a hotel in Solihull to discuss funding from the Guinness Trust.
Background from Solihull on Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) and Wikidata (CC0), summarised for this guide. Details change — check anything that matters to you.
Everyday life
The pedestrianised High Street is the spine of daily life, running from St Alphege church past independent shops toward the Touchwood centre and the older, open-air Mell Square. A farmers' market sets up on the High Street on the first Friday of the month, and the annual CAMRA beer festival, Solihull Carnival and a growing summer festival all use Tudor Grange Park as their stage, alongside a free fireworks display each November organised by the local Round Table. For an evening out there is the Core Theatre at the Solihull Arts Complex, a Cineworld (with a second, IMAX-equipped screen at the nearby Resorts World complex), a Michelin-starred restaurant in a former manor house, and touring arena acts a short way off at bp pulse LIVE. A weekend walk has plenty of choice within easy reach of the centre — Tudor Grange Park, Brueton Gardens and Malvern Park among them — and club life runs deep, from Rotary, Round Table, the Women's Institute and Scout groups to a symphony orchestra, a ballet school and a Morris side.
Housing character
The centre mixes surviving older buildings — the 16th-century George on the High Street, Georgian and Victorian fronts near the church — with post-war and more recent development around the shopping centres, and greenbelt land closes in from the south and east rather than more suburb. Families weighing schools will find both state-funded and independent options close together, including at least one selective school, so it is worth treating state and independent provision, and primary and secondary phases, as separate questions rather than one bundle. As with any town centre, what a specific street feels like — how close to the retail core, how close to a park, how close to a school gate — varies within a short walk, so it is worth treating this as a starting point for further, street-level checking rather than a verdict on the whole postcode district.
Getting around
Solihull railway station sits close to the town centre, with a reasonable density of bus stops around it, and the M42, M40 and M6 all converge nearby, which is part of why the National Exhibition Centre and Birmingham Airport — both technically within the borough — sit so close to the town. That road and rail convergence is a practical convenience rather than a guarantee of a short trip anywhere in particular, and no journey-time data is held here to put a figure on any specific commute, so anyone weighing a move against a workplace elsewhere should check a live timetable rather than assume.
Things to investigate
Every boundary and count used for this guide is a postcode-district proxy (B91), not an approved neighbourhood polygon, and it does not distinguish the town centre from the wider borough of the same name — a Solihull Metropolitan Borough figure is a different, larger thing from a B91 count, and the two should not be assumed to move together. No neighbourhood-level sale price, rent series, or journey-time data is connected, so any figures a reader sees alongside this text come from a local-authority average or a stops-within-a-kilometre count, not a district median. Confirm before relying on it: several named attractions and venues change over time — the Bear Grylls Adventure Park on the edge of town, for instance, closed at the end of 2024 — so check current opening status of anything time-sensitive directly with the venue rather than from this text.
Schools
Measured by distance from the area centre, straight line. Primary is a walk and secondary is a journey, so they are counted on different radii. Ofsted's published judgements, not a Greathome rating.
Primarystate-funded, within 2 km
6 schools
- Judged by Ofsted
- 4
- At least Good
- 3
- Outstanding or equivalent
- 0
- Below Good
- 1
Secondarystate-funded, within 5 km
10 schools
- Judged by Ofsted
- 8
- At least Good
- 7
- Outstanding or equivalent
- 0
- Below Good
- 1
15 open schools of every phase sit within 2 km, 2 of them independent. Independent schools carry no Ofsted judgement in this release, so they appear in the total and never in the judged figures. Nothing here establishes catchment, admissions eligibility or available places.
The nearest 6 schools, with their published judgement
| School | Phase | Distance | Published judgement |
|---|---|---|---|
| St Alphege Church of England Infant and Nursery School | Primary | 0.2 km | Not judged · Graded inspection, no overall grade |
| Solihull School | Not applicable | 0.4 km | No published judgement |
| Eversfield Preparatory School | Not applicable | 0.6 km | No published judgement |
| St Alphege Church of England Junior School | Primary | 0.7 km | Not judged · Graded inspection, no overall grade |
| Solihull Sixth Form College | 16 plus | 0.8 km | No published judgement |
| Solihull College & University Centre | 16 plus | 1.1 km | No published judgement |
Housing market context
£334,966average house price across Solihull, June 2026
A year earlier the same measure was £321,556, a change of +4.2%.
Average price across the whole local authority for one month, from the ONS series built on HM Land Registry UK House Price Index data. It is not a neighbourhood median and not a valuation of any property. Two guides in the same borough share this figure while their streets differ. House-price data is revised, and recent months are the most likely to move.
Source: Average house price by local authority, Office for National Statistics, from HM Land Registry UK House Price Index.
Boundary
Solihull, taken as the B91 postcode district. A postcode-district proxy, not an approved polygon. These are postcode districts standing in for an approved polygon. Present every count as "in these postcode districts", never as a neighbourhood or town-centre figure.
Sources
- Average house price by local authority — Office for National Statistics, from HM Land Registry UK House Price Index
- Get Information About Schools — Department for Education
- Ofsted inspection management information — Ofsted
- Street-level crime data — Police.uk
- Postcode and administrative geography — Postcodes.io / ONS
Evidence checked 2026-09-13. Last content change 2026-09-13. Next review 2026-09-20.
What is already known about Solihull
Geography from the official record. A district or place name is a group of postcodes, not one address.
- Live postcodes
- 853 in B91
- Localities
- Shirley, Knowle, Lyndon, Meriden
- Local authority
- Solihull
- Country
- England
- Centre postcode
- B91 3QG
The pin uses Postcodes.io coordinates, not an exact entrance or title boundary.
Districts next to B91
Found in the same 2.8 km sample around the centre of B91, from 224 live postcodes. Proximity, not a boundary.
Nearby pubs
Pubs mapped in OpenStreetMap within 2.0 miles of B91 3SR, nearest first.
Loading nearby pubs…
Place data from OpenStreetMap, available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL). © OpenStreetMap contributors
Look this place up in detail
Each of these opens on B91 3SR, the postcode anchoring Solihull, and queries its own source only when you open it.
Geography and local records
Local records load separately while you read the guide.
What this report does not cover
- neighbourhood median sale price (not_available): Only a local-authority average is connected, from ONS. A neighbourhood median needs enough geocoded transactions inside the guide boundary, which the per-postcode HMLR queries cannot supply.
- rents (not_available): No rent series is connected. Advertised rents and official all-tenancy measures are different things and neither is available here yet.
- journey times (not_available): No journey planner is connected. Transport is measured as nearby stops, not as time to anywhere. TfL PTAL and journey-time APIs would replace it for London.
- school admissions history (not_available): Admission arrangements are held by each admission authority and are not in the GIAS or Ofsted snapshots.
- licensed premises and venues (not_available): No licensing register or venue dataset is connected. Food-hygiene categories are not a pub register.
- image rights (not_yet_verified): No licensed image library is connected. Return an image brief rather than an asset.
- approved boundary polygon (not_yet_verified): Boundaries are postcode-district proxies. Counts describe the districts named, not a town-centre polygon.