Hay Mills is an area of east Birmingham, England straddling the A45 Coventry Road about south east of the city centre. North of the Coventry Road is mainly residential whereas the south is mixed residential and commercial. The area was subsumed into Birmingham in 1911. History Haye is the first recorded name dating to 1171 and Hayemill by 1495. In Old English, gehaeg means 'fenced/ hedged land'. Here would have been the farm of a medieval family who had enclosed some of the fertile land near the River Cole. The enclosed fields may have been surrounded by a substantial ditch perhaps as wide as two metres and over a metre in depth. There was a corresponding bank of similar dimensions. It is likely that the bank would have been topped with a fence while a live hedge grew. The hedge would have been planted with hawthorn, a quick growing tree whose name literally means 'hedge thorn'. It is likely that the enclosures would have been used for keeping livestock, probably cattle, close to the lush watermeadows along the river. Hugh de la Haye, his family name taken from the placename, is recorded in 1171. The district takes its full name from Hay Mill which stood on the River Cole near James Road/ Mill Road. The mill belonged to the occupants of Hay Hall and ground corn from at least 1495. Converted to blade grinding probably during the Civil War, this trade continued until about 1830 when James Horsfall, a wire drawer of Digbeth moved here. There was no settlement at Hay Mills in 1834, but by 1888 the south side of the Coventry Road was being built up from Heybarnes Road to Forest Road. Horsfall had the old buildings demolished and rebuilt some 100m north of the old site. A larger mill with a larger pool was built for wire drawing. Other industries included iron founding, brick manufacture, cabinet manufacture, electrical switch making and the embryonic British motorcycle industry in Kings Road. By 1906 there was considerable urbanisation, although Hay Mills was still separated from Small Heath by the undeveloped Cole valley and in the parish of Yardley, Worcestershire, until becoming part of Birmingham in 1911. Geography Hay Mills is the area on and immediately either side of the A45 Coventry Road once the River Cole has been crossed heading east out of Birmingham until the junction with the A4040