Quote Originally Posted by oldboots View Post
BTW Hockley and the Jewellery Quarter are pretty much the same place so why the Birmingham Mail separates them I don't know.
Quote Originally Posted by sheffield hatter View Post
Yeah, but so does Pubs Galore! I went to the Jewellers Arms a couple of weeks ago and was surprised to find it was not in the Jewellery Quarter! (I've done a bit of a tidy, with what I thought were obvious JQ pubs now appearing in both Hockley & JQ. Others may want to rearrange them - which I am happy with if it's based on local and therefore better knowledge.)

Quote Originally Posted by rpadam View Post
The Jewellery Quarter only covers the eastern part of the wider area that might also be called Hockley, but it also creeps a bit further towards the city centre (and almost anywhere in the West Midlands if you are a proponent of estate agents' geography, a bit like Hoxton in London...).

Personal view:
a) anything west of the A4540 Icknield Street as far as the Black Eagle is just Hockley;
b) anything between the A4540 and the Birmingham & Fazeley Canal could be Jewellery Quarter or Hockley; and
c) anything between the canal and A4400 Queensway could be Jewellery Quarter or Birmingham Central.

Quote Originally Posted by oldboots View Post
Where an area has not been a parish or electoral ward it is a generally fruitless exercise trying to define its boundaries, Hockley has been neither, it was apparently part of a landed estate in belonging to the Colmore family. The Jewellery Quarter being an informal name is even less easy to define, as you surmise, luckily for estate agents.

Quote Originally Posted by rpadam View Post
I wish I'd found this site sooner - it would have saved me some typing and broadly supports my a), b), c) hypothesis.
[I thought it would be useful to summarise this discussion and remove it from the (largely unrelated) thread in which it originated.]

Let me begin by saying that I find both of your contributions interesting and valuable, and they have provided some insight for me into an area (in both senses of the word) I hadn't really given much thought to. And anyway #geographygalorerulesok.

However, I think you are possibly overlooking the meaning and purpose of the areas on Pubs Galore. The name for this feature is "served areas". I take that to mean that a pub that is just outside the area (as a geographical entity) can serve the area even if all the people who drink in the pub disagree. It would need a serious barrier, like a river or a railway track without bridges or underpasses, I suggest. I remember a similar discussion a few years ago when I seriously annoyed Conrad about an area in York that was split by the railway. In those sorts of cases it may be useful to think about what the parish or ward boundaries are, but in general it's not.

Here's an example: in London, a lot of the areas that have been developed on the site are based around tube stations. A lot of the time that makes sense: in an intensely developed urban area, the tube station is a landmark that people refer to. But the further you get from a tube station that acts as the centre of one of our areas, the nearer you're going to be to another tube station. There comes a point where a pub is within a reasonable walking distance of two (or possibly more) tube stations. In Birmingham it makes sense that the area near the railway station and tram stop called Jewellery Quarter is called Jewellery Quarter, whether or not a tourist leaflet defines it the same way. Similarly, and without knowing the first thing about the canal in Birmingham, is it really such a barrier as is suggested by Richard's points b) and c)? Maybe it looks like a convenient line on the map, but in reality?

Interested to hear your thoughts on this. And anyone else who wants to dip their toes into the murky waters of #geographygalore.