Frank Taylor Lockwood painted this view of the fields on way to Sheldon from Yardley when he first lived in Birmingham. He later moved back to Birmingham in 1926 and worked for Cadbury Bros until he retired in the late 1950's. In the 1921 Kellys Directory, Sheldon is described as 'small but little frequented'. Under the list of commercial residencies the majority were farmers. It was at this time that sporadic house building began around the Coventry Road area.In 1924 Kellys states that the farmers own nearly all the land and that the chief crops are wheat, barley, beans and oats. Between 1924-29 houses were being built on Sheaf Lane, Horse Shoes Lane and Common Lane. By 1928 Sheldon has more in the way of local convinces that we now know today including three shopkeepers and two grocers.These first few watercolours he produced illustrating the fields and farms around Yardley, Sheldon and Hall Green, were topics he continued to write about and paint in the forthcoming decades. When looking at a map of Yardley and Sheldon in the 1920's Lockwood's work illustrates how rural these areas were. A map only ten years later show the blank spaces where fields and meadows once existed, now covered by a network of roads.