URBAN PLANNING

Urban Planning: Birmingham

Urban Planning: Birmingham

Introduction

The story of middle-class suburban flight in the Victorian period is one long familiar to urban historians. Indeed, H.J. Dyos' groundbreaking study of Clerkenwell can be argued as being a critical element in the genesis of urban history as a discipline in Britain. In the new suburbs, the inconvenience of the longer journey to work and isolation from city centre services was compensated for by larger houses and a more amenable environment. Jackson has argued that this reversal of the old walking city model-where the poor lived on the cheaper urban fringe-was 'the most fundamental realignment of urban structure in the 4,500-year past of cities on this planet'. By-products of this were the creation of a uniquely suburban culture and consciousness, grounded in notions of privacy, respectability and an arcadian urbs in rus.

Between 1919 and 1939 the extent of urban Britain exploded from 5.9 per cent of the country's total acreage to 8.6 per cent. Part-fuelled by a speculative house building boom, this expansion was assisted by a massive expansion of the hitherto negligible Local Authority housing programme. Swenarton notes the importance of wartime rent controls and a popular campaign to promise decent housing for returning soldiers, examining how this change in policy allowed the suburban dream to trickle down the social scale. As a result over 1 million Local Authority dwellings, the great majority being suburban 'cottages', were erected between the wars. For tenants on marginal incomes, the choice made by many to make sacrifices of comfort and recreation in order to afford the suburban lifestyle is well attested to in numerous studies by contemporary social commentators and social scientists from Orwell to M'Gonigle.

The inter-war suburban council house in Britain was, for the most part, similar to that of the speculative developer-a large, traditionally built, two-storey property, erected at the standard density of 12 houses per acre as laid down in the 1918 Tudor Walters Report on the provision of housing for the working classes. In the inner cities, however, small-scale Local Authority slum clearance programmes had resulted in a trickle of low-rise flats for working-class tenants being built. This was partly a consequence of the Artisans' and Labourers' Dwellings Improvement Act, 1875 (the Cross Act), which required that a similar number of new dwellings be built as were demolished in clearance areas. On crowded slum sites, this generally meant flats were required. Even Birmingham, a city that many claimed was not 'flat minded', had been building small numbers of inner city flats since 1901 taking a foray into consciously 'modern' design with the four-storey St Martins flats at Emily Street in the late 1930s. Flats did not, however, penetrate the English suburb, where the ideal of the single-family home remained sacrosanct.

Reconstruction in Birmingham, 1945-50

The Labour governments of 1945-50 and 1950-51 did not grant the Midlands region a new town, with the exception of a small scheme at Corby serving the local steel plant. The new town model was expensive and the cash-strapped ...