Melksham Square, Royal-sutton-coldfield

Castle Bromwich Airfield opened in 1915 to train pilots, then became the test strip for Spitfires built at the Vickers factory across Chester Road, now Jaguar. The airfield closed in 1958, and the land beneath today's estate had served military aviation for over four decades.

Birmingham bought the Air Ministry land in 1955 debating a low-rise garden city for 15,000 or towers for 20,000, then built fast: by 1966, 2,000 people lived there but only one corner shop served them. A 1994 resident ballot handed 3,500 properties to a Housing Action Trust, whose 1995 master plan reshaped the estate.

The land under Melksham Square was River Tame floodplain, sold as 350 Berwood Farm acres to the Drainage Board in 1881, with Plants Brook then diverted east. By 1929, a pilot writing to the Birmingham Mail warned that industrial fog made flying here all but impossible from October to April.

In 1914 the Great Air Race drew 80,000 spectators to Castle Bromwich; during the First World War the same field killed 30 pilots in over 70 accidents. The world's first helicopter service landed here in 1950, and a Tim Tolkien sculpture of three Spitfires still marks the estate entrance.