Near the modern city centre of Birmingham, on a side road that today looks rather forgotten about, is something of an anachronism. Whereas we might think of Birmingham architecture today in terms of the brutalist Rotunda, or the 21st century rounded curves of the Selfridges building, this is a very different building – one that reeks of the Edwardian era.

This is the Craven Arms, a small inner city pub that has welcomed Midland drinkers since the 1830s, according to popular history (it may have been a far more humble building originally, as its landlord in the 1840s combined working as a publican with another job as a stamper, and in 1851 was listed merely as a stamper with no mention of the pub). Its fortunes, and those of the road it sits on – Upper Gough Street – is a microcosm of the city: at one point, it was part of a long row of buildings, whereas now it sits isolated on its side of the road. Once, it sat joining onto a row of back-to-back housing, at 4-10 Upper Gough Street. These were common in Birmingham, but most of which were razed to the ground as part of slum clearances in the last century (a remaining row of such housing, on the corner of Hurst and Inge Streets a ten-minute walk away, is now owned and run by the National Trust, which operates guided tours, detailing some of the former residents). Today, you can still see how the pub formed the corner of two rows of houses – there are now large gaps either side, leaving the pub as a strangely isolated building adrift from its surroundings, whereas in the 19th century it was very much in the centre of its community.

Yet despite its rather bland surroundings, the Craven Arms building is anything but boring. It is a shrine to Edwardian style, redone in 1906 in contrasting glazed majolica tiling, blues and yellows, highly decorative and highly stylised. The building is now locally listed, but it’s still a working pub. If you go for a drink there today, you will still have your pint in a bar where the Edwardian fireplace survives and where drinkers a century ago kept warm. It’s not the only picturesque Edwardian pub that survives in an inner city – for example, the Golden Cross in Cardiff is another striking example of an Art Nouveau style pub – but simply one of its kind, once seen as functional but now redolent of a previous, lost era.

One reason why the Craven Arms is significant is that one single family ran the pub from the mid-19th century to the 1910s: Jeremiah Turner ran the Craven Arms until his death, when his son-in-law Thomas took over. When Thomas in turn died, his widow Mary – Jeremiah’s daughter – took over. Finally, their second son, Walter, managed the pub before moving on to a different site in the 20th century. The family’s association with this single public house, as shown through censuses and archival records, shows a continuity at odds with the rapidly changing city around them.

Jeremiah Turner was from Shropshire, born in Wellington in 1811, but moved to Birmingham like many others in the earlier part of the 19th century. As a young man, he worked as an ironmonger, but then changed career in middle age. The 1861 census records him as a retail brewer living at the Craven Arms at 1-2 Upper Gough Street with his wife Mary and his children, including 15-year-old daughter Mary. Jeremiah died at the pub on 13 January 1864. Life continued, though, and barely four months after his death, the family was placing an advert in the local newspapers asking for a ‘strong active girl’ to work at the pub. The pub was more than a drinking place for locals; it was where committees and clubs would have meetings over a beer as well. In 1865, it was where one such committee met to discuss the case of Elizabeth Taylor, a woman who had been assaulted so badly by a man that the attack had left her blind. The committee had formed to raise money for her care by organising a raffle of sorts, where the public would pay for tickets and the chance to win a prize. Their meetings to fundraise and organise events were usually held at the Craven Arms, with the pub being listed as their address for correspondence.

On 7 November 1865, Mary Turner married Thomas Fallows at St Chad’s Cathedral. Thomas, who was from Stafford, may have been working as a servant at another Birmingham pub by the time he was 20; yet his marriage to Mary meant that he moved up the social ladder, with a marriage notice being placed in the Birmingham Daily Post, noting that Mary was the eldest daughter of the late Jeremiah Turner, ‘of Upper Gough Street in this town’. When the census was taken six years later, Thomas and Mary were recorded as resident at the Craven Arms. The pub was originally 1-2 Upper Gough Street – number 3 was a grocer’s shop, which eventually became part of the pub. In 1871, though, the Fallows were next door to the grocer, living on site with their little sons Herbert and Walter (three more children would have been born by the time of the next census).

Six months after the census, in October 1881, the Birmingham Mail recorded Thomas as a ‘local failure’, after he filed a petition for liquidation at the Birmingham Court of Bankruptcy. He had liabilities estimated at £850 – over £56,000 today. Thomas was still only 40 years old, but his life would not be a long one. On 6 January 1888, aged 48, he died at the pub. His will was proved by Mary, and his personal estate was valued at £63 10s. After his death, Mary stayed on at the pub, and ran it herself. Birmingham was the city of a thousand trades, and there was plenty of work to be had in industrial jobs. Therefore, her children initially worked in other fields with Walter, for example, working as a bicycle machinist at the age of 20.

Mary had died by the time the 1901 census was taken; she possibly died back in 1893. In 1895, son Walter married Florence Sargent, having his first child less than a year later. Once a married man and father, Walter became a publican. The 1901 census for Upper Gough Street records Walter Fallows as the publican of the Craven Arms. Like his parents before him, he lived on site with his family – wife Florence, daughter Mary Florence and niece, confusingly named Florence Mary. Keeping it in the family, he employed his sister-in-law Laura as a barmaid.

Five years after the census was taken, renovations were undertaken at the Craven Arms, turning it from a humble Victorian boozer to a shiny tiled Edwardian pub. But behind the scenes, much stayed as before, with Walter remaining in charge. By 1911, however, he was able to move his family into a different property, while remaining the publican of the Craven Arms. The 1911 census records just one person at the pub – the barman. The Fallows family, meanwhile, were at a new house, not so close to the city centre.

Walter Fallows is still listed as the publican of the Craven Arms in local trade directories during World War One, but he had died by the 1930s. The 1939 Register shows a new family living at the pub – the Fosters. The era of the Fallows ended between the two world wars, following decades of running the pub while the city and world changed around it.