Name: Joanne's Florist & Tea Room, reviewed
Item: Joanne's Florist & Tea Room
Rating: 6.0

The verdict

Joanne's is the only business in this guide that will sell you a bouquet and a pot of tea, and that combination is a more serious piece of retail thinking than it first appears. It has traded on Hawthorn Road in Kingstanding since 1999, on a high street that has had a hard twenty-five years, and the tea room is what gives people a second reason to stop. A flower shop alone on that road would be a shop you visit four times a year. A flower shop with tables is somewhere you go on a Tuesday. The floristry itself is conventional suburban work, priced for Kingstanding rather than for Sutton, with delivery across the northern suburbs including Aston, Perry Barr, Nechells and the surrounding wards. It appears on the delivery rosters of several national relay networks, which is the usual sign of a shop with reliable local fulfilment. What holds it back is the same thing that holds back most of this section: very little is published. There is a website but it is thin, no prices, no clear cut-off, and a slight confusion in the record between the Hawthorn Road address and a Kingstanding Road one. The tea room, which is the genuinely distinguishing feature, is barely promoted at all.

The shop has traded since 1999 from Hawthorn Road in Kingstanding, combining floristry with a tea room. Delivery covers Kingstanding, Great Barr, Perry Barr, Aston, Nechells and the surrounding northern wards, and it appears as a fulfilment partner on several national flower networks. The address appears in some listings as Kingstanding Road rather than Hawthorn Road; the business's own site and the majority of records give 206 Hawthorn Road.

Best for

Anyone in the northern suburbs who wants to buy flowers somewhere that is also a place to sit down. For an elderly relative or a slow errand, the tea room genuinely changes the experience.

What I would order

Go in rather than ordering online, and use the tea room while they make it up. For delivery, phone and give the ward rather than just the postcode; this shop knows the northern wards well.

Worth knowing

Little is published: no prices, no clear delivery cut-off, a thin website, and an address discrepancy across directories. Confirm Hawthorn Road rather than Kingstanding Road before travelling. Nothing stated about seasonality or sourcing.

Runs a tea room alongside the flowers, which no other shop on this list does.

Who it is not for

Anyone who wants to compare prices and order online. Wildwood Florist at Four Oaks publishes everything this shop does not.

How it compares

hedge in Stirchley is the other entry here that pairs flowers with something else, in that case clothing and homeware. Both work for the same reason: a small shop needs more than one reason to be visited.

Getting there

Hawthorn Road, Kingstanding, on the bus routes north from Perry Barr. There is parking on the surrounding roads. The nearest station is Perry Barr, about two miles away, so this is realistically a bus or car trip.

Where this assessment comes from

Desk research only. The 1999 founding, the tea room and the address are taken from the business's own pages and corroborated by directory listings, though the postcode varies slightly between sources. No prices or cut-off times are published.

Sources consulted: The business's own two websites and about page carrying the 1999 date, Florist Central's B44 8JP record, Yell's Joanne's Florist & Tea Room listing, and the national network delivery pages naming it as a Birmingham B20 and B44 fulfilment florist.

This is a desk-based, opinion-led write-up, not an inspection: I have not audited this business, tested a delivery, or spoken to the owner. Everything above is one person’s reading of information that anyone can look up, and none of it represents the views of the owner of this domain. If you run this shop and something here is wrong or out of date, please tell me and I will fix it.