Herbert Manzoni

Autumn, 1933

In the autumn of 1933 the writer J. B. Priestley came into Birmingham on the bus from Coventry. He had never been there before. Watching the outskirts go by, he asked himself whether this really looked like the entrance to the second city in England. His answer, printed in English Journey the following year, was blunt: “It did. It looked a dirty muddle.”

Then he reached Colmore Row, and the city won him round. “Here in Colmore Row,” he wrote, “you could imagine yourself in the second city of England.” Where the Council House turns into Victoria Square, with Hill Street falling away beneath the bridge the Post Office had thrown across the road, he found the finest view in town: “If there is any better view in Birmingham than this, I never saw it.”

A very narrow limit

That was the Victorian centre, and Priestley was precise about how small it was. “So long as you keep within a very narrow limit in the centre, Colmore Row, New Street, Corporation Street,” he wrote, “Birmingham has quite a metropolitan air.” He noticed that the city had “a passion for arcades” and “a passion for bridging streets”.

Downhill lay an older Birmingham. The Market Hall had stood above the Bull Ring since 1835, the wholesale fish market in Bell Street since 1869. The Victoria County History records that the open-air Bull Ring market was still selling poultry, eggs, rabbits, flowers and shrubs in 1950. Trams still ground through the streets. The council had begun replacing them with buses in 1930, but the last routes would not go until 1953.

Mean dinginess

Priestley took a tram out of the centre, and the spell broke.

He was careful about what he was describing: “It was not, you understand, a slum.” It was the ordinary fabric of an industrial city, “so many miles of ugliness, squalor, and the wrong kind of vulgarity”. From the edge he looked back at “the vast smoky hollow of the city, with innumerable tall chimneys thrusting out of the murk”. At night his hotel room was “vibrating with the roar of changing gears and accelerated engines”.

The figures behind his gloom were stark. In 1931 the central ward of St Martin’s and Deritend held 95.9 people to the acre, the densest in the borough. In 1936, after more than 73,000 new houses had been completed, Birmingham still had over 38,000 back-to-back houses, 13,000 houses without their own water supply and 51,000 without their own lavatory.

A city that worked

Yet the muddle made money. Through the slump, the VCH says, the motor and electrical industries “hardly hesitated in their expansion”. Unemployment in Birmingham fell from 17.7 per cent in 1931 to 8.1 per cent in 1934. That year the Austin works at Longbridge employed 14,000 people and turned out 1,500 cars a week. In 1931 the city counted 5,856 factories and 2,545 workshops, many of them wedged in among the houses.

The new edge

On the rim of the city, a different Birmingham was going up. Between the wars the council built 50,268 houses, homes for about 200,000 people, most of them at twelve to the acre with gardens. The VCH names Kingstanding as the largest of these “vast new suburbs”. All of that was under way before Herbert Manzoni became City Engineer in 1935, and long before his great post-war schemes.

On another trip Priestley rode out to Bournville, travelling, he wrote, “through dignified Birmingham, messy Birmingham, to planned Birmingham”. After the war the city’s engineers set out to turn the whole of it into the third kind.

Herbert Manzoni never stood for election. He did not own the land he cleared or sit on the council that paid for it. Yet for twenty-eight years few people did more to decide what Birmingham would look like.

From Birkenhead to the sewers

He was born in Birkenhead in 1899, the son, according to the Moseley Society, of an Italian potter and sculptor who worked in the Arts and Crafts style. He studied at Liverpool University and served three years as a pupil of Birkenhead’s Borough Engineer. In 1923 he came to Birmingham as an engineering assistant in the Sewers and Rivers Section of the Public Works Department. He began, in other words, with the drains.

He rose quickly. In 1927 he became chief engineer of the section, in 1929 Deputy City Engineer, and on 17 July 1935, in his mid-thirties, he succeeded Herbert Humphries as City Engineer and Surveyor. The council’s own history of planning, published in 1989, called it “the beginning of a remarkable era”.

One office, every job

The title hid how much the job covered. The City Engineer and Surveyor’s office combined engineering, surveying, town planning and architecture. Not until 1952 did the council create a separate City Architect, and even then its report went out of its way to say this was no criticism of Manzoni. It was “a very high tribute to Mr. Manzoni”, the report said, that he had so far been able “so successfully to command so large an undertaking”. People qualified in both fields, it added, were “now very rare”.

That concentration of work had a cost. In 1959 the planner Leslie Ginsburg complained that planning in Birmingham was spread across “a dozen departments”, and that the redevelopment section had “less than six qualified town planners and not a single architect”.

How an official gets power

The planning historian Peter Larkham calls Manzoni “a powerful and influential personality”. He was, Larkham writes, “professionally very well connected, tended to work well with his committee chairmen, and had a personal air of authority and confidence”. When the West Midland Group on Post-War Reconstruction and Planning was set up in January 1941, he was one of only two representatives of Birmingham’s local government in it.

The honours followed. The New Year Honours of 1941 made him a CBE “for services in connection with Civil Defence”. He was knighted in 1954, dubbed at Buckingham Palace on 16 February by the Queen Mother, acting for the Queen. In 1960 his fellow engineers made him President of the Institution of Civil Engineers.

The councillor who pushed

He did not do it alone, and Larkham is wary of casting him as a dictator. Especially towards the end of Manzoni’s time, Larkham argues, the committee chairmen were more influential, above all Frank Price. Price stood for the council in 1949 aged 27, chaired the Public Works Committee from 1954 and was Lord Mayor in 1964–65. He was conscious of growing up in the city’s inner slums, and Larkham describes him as “abrasive and outspoken”. Price’s lobbying of the Minister was, by his own later account, “bullying”. Councillors pushed; Manzoni planned.

Late in life, interviewed by the historian Anthony Sutcliffe, Manzoni weighed his own part carefully.

He also made a bolder claim. Birmingham had been ready for the new planning powers of the 1940s, he said, “because we’d shaped the legislation for it, or at least we had been there while it was being shaped”. Larkham’s dry gloss: by “we”, Manzoni meant himself.

Retirement

He retired in 1963 and was succeeded by Neville Borg, eight years before the ring road was finished. He died on 18 November 1972. Two years later Sutcliffe and Roger Smith dedicated their history of modern Birmingham to his memory, calling him “the creator of modern Birmingham”.

A loop drawn in 1917

The idea of the Inner Ring Road is older than Manzoni’s career in Birmingham. In October 1917, with the First World War still being fought, the council debated a report on the widths of the city’s main roads. In an appendix, the chairman of the Public Works Committee, Councillor Talbot, proposed widening the radial roads “until we arrive at certain streets near the centre, forming a kind of loop round the centre”. Widening lines were approved in January 1918. The council’s 1989 history notes that Talbot’s streets “were almost identical to the line eventually adopted for the Inner Ring Road”. No detailed scheme followed, though; only piecemeal widenings.

Rebuilding a district

Manzoni’s first great scheme came as soon as he took charge. The Housing Act of 1935 gave councils new powers to redevelop whole areas, and he drew up a plan for part of Duddeston and Nechells that separated homes from industry. It grew to 267 acres, at an estimated cost of £6 million, and the council approved it in November 1937: the city’s first comprehensive redevelopment area plan. By 1941, the historian Carl Chinn writes, his department was drawing up plans for three more areas, at Gooch Street, Summer Lane and Ladywood. In September 1939 he wrote a paper on city planning for a British–American engineering congress in New York.

The bombs

Then came the raids. On 27 February 1941, with the city still clearing up after the winter bombing, the Birmingham Mail asked its City Engineer whether the damage meant Birmingham would have to be replanned. His answer, as quoted by Larkham, was this.

Asked whether the bombing had altered his plans, he gave a one-word reply: “no”. The damage was far from a clean sweep, he said, and “any dream that a completely new city can emerge, Phoenix-like […] is quite erroneous”.

Larkham’s verdict is that Manzoni “had already identified five slum clearance areas, which became the main focus for rebuilding, together with the inner ring road: ideas which predated the bombing”. Sutcliffe and Smith add that even after the raids, his slum-clearance task was “still almost as great as it had been in 1939”.

Turning plans into powers

What the war changed was the law, and Manzoni moved fast. On 16 October 1941 he gave the Public Works Committee a confidential preliminary report on planning the centre. Four advisory panels followed, on traffic, the limits of the city, redevelopment areas and housing. In June 1942 he published a paper on post-war planning and reconstruction for his fellow engineers. On 29 April 1943 the committee approved his ring road in principle.

When the Town and Country Planning Act of 1944 gave councils powers to buy land on a large scale, Birmingham moved before anyone else, or so Manzoni later claimed. “We in Birmingham were ready,” Manzoni recalled in 1968, “because our plans had already been drawn up in detail, and we took advantage of these powers.” Other cities, he added, “had not been so well prepared as we were”.

The council then went to Parliament. The local historian Keith Jordan dates the council’s approval of the scheme to July 1944; Larkham, working from the minutes, has the full council authorising a Parliamentary Bill in July 1945. The Birmingham Corporation Act 1946 gave powers to build the road and to buy the land compulsorily. Larkham calls it “the largest such local authority scheme to have come before Parliament”. Not every clause survived: after the Chamber of Commerce petitioned, a Commons committee struck out several, including one that would have made parking provision a condition of planning permission.

In 1947 the council completed the purchase of about 1,400 acres in five districts lying in a horseshoe round the centre: Duddeston and Nechells, Summer Lane, Ladywood, Bath Row and Gooch Street. Manzoni set a twenty-five-year timetable for the rebuilding.

Would it have happened anyway?

Larkham thinks so. “It is highly likely that a ring road would have been designed even without the impetus of bomb damage,” he writes. But the bombs did help to decide where it ran. Manzoni explained in 1961 that the route had been chosen “as far as possible to avoid the most valuable property, and advantage was taken of sites where the buildings had been destroyed or damaged”. The Luftwaffe did not draw the plan. It did, here and there, clear the way for it.

The houses

Start with the houses, because everyone at the time did. A survey in 1946 found 29,000 back-to-back houses still standing in Birmingham, 6,500 homes without their own water supply, nearly 40,000 without their own lavatory and more than 142,000 without a bathroom. In December 1949 the minister responsible, Aneurin Bevan, told the Commons that of the 29,182 back-to-backs counted in September 1946, just 807 had since been closed or demolished.

The closer people looked, the worse it got. A survey in 1954 found more than 50,000 houses, one in five in the city, unfit to live in. When the housing minister Henry Brooke listed fifty councils facing a substantial long-term slum problem in 1960, only Liverpool and Manchester had more unfit houses than Birmingham’s 50,250.

Manzoni did not believe in patching. Writing for the Town Planning Institute in 1955, he set out why.

Nowhere to put people

Building alone could not keep up. About 37,500 houses went up in the city between 1945 and 1956, most of them council houses. In 1955 the council reckoned it needed 50,000 more homes and had land for only 8,000. In 1956 it hoped to move 220,000 people out to “overspill” towns over twenty years. The housing historian John Boughton notes that by 1957 the neighbouring councils had allocated just 38 houses to Birmingham families.

The traffic

Then there was the traffic. The Victoria County History, written as the ring road went up, says through traffic “had grown too heavy to be adequately served by the existing system of one-way streets”. And the cars were coming. Government figures show that in 1951 only 14 per cent of British households had a car; by 1961 it was 31 per cent, and by 1971 more than half.

For the city’s factories, a jam was a bill. In November 1956 a council deputation told the Minister of Transport that Joseph Lucas’s twelve factories ran 300 vehicles inside the city, and that a five-mile crossing took half an hour. Lifting average speeds from 10 to 12 miles an hour across the city’s 28,000 goods vehicles, it argued, would save “of the order of £2 million a year”.

The spirit of the age

Keeping people and traffic apart was the advanced thinking of the time. In 1946 the Ministry of War Transport advised that main roads be separated from pedestrian routes and not lined with “shops of types which attract crowds”. The planning historian David Adams links Birmingham’s flyovers and underpasses to the multi-level crossings imagined by Le Corbusier, the architect who wrote that “we must pull things down and throw the corpses onto the garbage heap”.

Westminster supplied the tools. Introducing the 1947 planning bill, the minister Lewis Silkin listed what the nation’s land was needed for, including “the clearance of slums and the rebuilding of blitzed areas, the redevelopment of obsolete and badly laid out areas”. Under the 1944 Act, he noted, “Grants were provided for blitzed areas, but not for areas of blight”. Now councils would be able to buy land compulsorily for all planning purposes and pay “merely the value of the land for its existing use”. After 1951, Larkham adds, building materials came off the ration, a 100 per cent levy on land values was scrapped and private developers forced the pace.

Ahead of the textbook

It is often assumed that Britain’s urban motorways followed Colin Buchanan’s famous report, Traffic in Towns. In Birmingham the order ran the other way. The ring road was approved in principle in 1943 and its first section opened in 1960. Buchanan’s report came out in November 1963. Presenting it, the transport minister Ernest Marples said: “Cars are a boon. But they have now started to choke movement and, indeed, to threaten the quality of urban life.”

By then outsiders were dazzled. In 1959 the Architect & Building News called Birmingham’s programme “probably the biggest and boldest scheme of comprehensive redevelopment ever undertaken in this country”. To families with no lavatory of their own, stuck in jams in narrow old streets, the bulldozer did not look like vandalism. It looked like the future arriving at last.

The map below lets you move between four versions of the same square mile, lined up exactly: the Victorian city of the 1890s; the city as the war left it in 1950, before any ring-road work began; the city as the planners had finished it by 1974; and the streets as they are today. The ring road is drawn section by section and marked by what has happened to it since: survives, altered or gone.

The shaded areas show roughly where the five redevelopment areas lay. They are redrawn from a simplified published sketch map, so treat them as a guide to where the great clearances happened, not as a record of whether a particular street was inside them. Historic maps and aerial photographs are reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

A bang in 1957

On 8 March 1957 the Minister of Transport, Harold Watkinson, set off an explosive charge to bring down a wall in central Birmingham. It was the ceremonial start of the Inner Ring Road, fourteen years after the Public Works Committee had approved it in principle and forty years after Councillor Talbot first sketched his loop. Watkinson had agreed the government money in January.

The design was Manzoni’s. A dual carriageway 110 feet wide, with an extra lane for stationary vehicles, would cross every main road into the centre. It was drawn so that no point inside it lay more than 300 yards away, the distance, Larkham explains, that people could reasonably be expected to walk from the car parks and bus stops that would line it. The aim, Manzoni later insisted, was to keep cars out of the core, not to invite them in.

He was just as insistent about what kind of road it was. In 1961 he told the Institution of Civil Engineers that it was “a city street of novel character—it is not an urban motorway, nor principally a traffic street or a shopping street”, and that its design was “a consciously chosen compromise between the needs of traffic, cost and amenity”. The historian Simon Gunn, writing in 2018, calls it “Britain’s first complete urban motorway”. Keith Jordan is blunter still: it was “an ‘engineer’s plan’ and not a ‘planner’s plan’”.

Section by section

Work began in the south-west, from Horse Fair towards New Street station. Smallbrook Ringway was raised above the ground with car parks underneath. On 8 April 1959 a subway opened beneath it at Hill Street and Hurst Street; Jordan claims it was the first in the country to be the only way pedestrians could cross a road. On 11 March 1960 the Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples, opened the first section, from Horse Fair to Queen’s Drive. By 1961 the road had reached Carrs Lane. At the Bull Ring, the photographer John Ball recorded Phillips Street widened into one carriageway and Bell Street into the other, slicing the old market quarter off from the streets above it.

Through the 1960s the road swung north and west: Moor Street Queensway; the elevated Masshouse Circus; Lancaster Circus; St Chad’s, where Pugin’s Bishop’s House had been demolished in 1959 to make way for it; and the tunnels under Great Charles Street and Paradise Circus. Jordan counts three and a half miles of roadwork in all, of which the ring itself was two and a quarter, with eight large underpasses or circuses and 52 pedestrian subways. The bill climbed with it: land from £12 million to £21 million, construction from £2.5 million to £13.25 million.

Manzoni retired in 1963, so most of the road was built under his successor, Neville Borg, on the lines Manzoni had laid down. The full circuit was first used by traffic on 4 January 1971, and the Queen formally opened it on 7 April 1971 (one historian gives 8 April). One part never came. The widening of Colmore Row, which would have taken a large part of the cathedral churchyard, was dropped that same year.

Cracks

The road aged fast. In May 1977 cracks closed the Masshouse Circus underpass. The Sunday Times reported rainwater pouring down supporting beams, “rusting the reinforcement”, and predicted that Masshouse and Smallbrook could collapse within a decade. A West Midlands County Council inquiry found the road structurally sound but noted poor workmanship, including at Masshouse.

There was worse. The Masshouse contract had gone in 1963 to the firm of Bryant. In June 1977, Gunn records, the Birmingham Post was calling the affair around the firm a “Birmingham Watergate”, and in April 1978 three Bryant directors were convicted of corruption, having secured contracts worth £112 million from the Corporation since 1963. The road that was meant to show Birmingham at its most modern had become, for a while, a symbol of something else.

What follows is a roll-call of what went: streets, a market, a college, a library, a bishop’s house, whole neighbourhoods. Each card says, as precisely as the evidence allows, why it went and who decided.

That matters, because not everything lost in post-war Birmingham was lost to Manzoni. Some places stood in the path of the ring road. Some lay inside the redevelopment areas the council bought in 1947. Some were wrecked by bombs first and cleared later. Some went years after he retired, in schemes that grew out of his road. And some had nothing to do with him: British Railways pulled down the Victorian New Street station in 1964, and the Georgian Old Square had been swept away in 1882 for Corporation Street. Birmingham was tearing itself down and starting again long before Manzoni was born.

Set the cards against the words the council’s own 1989 history dates to 1957.

It is the comparison everyone reaches for. A newspaper of the time, quoted by the local historian Keith Jordan, put it like this.

In 2013 a Birmingham journalist repeated the quip that Manzoni had brought more damage to the city “than the Luftwaffe could only ever dream of”. These are quips, not findings. What does the evidence say?

What the bombs did

Start with what cannot be compared. Between August 1940 and April 1943 German air raids killed 2,241 people in Birmingham. Nothing done in peacetime belongs on the same scale as that. The only comparison worth making is about buildings and streets.

The damage to buildings was heavy but scattered. In June 1945 the Ministry of Works told Parliament that about 90,000 houses had been affected and 5,000 destroyed. The Victoria County History, written around 1961, puts the number destroyed beyond repair at about 12,000; the two figures probably count different things. Almost all of them, the VCH says, were in the central area, and three-quarters were slum or near-slum property.

In the centre, Larkham finds, damage was “extensive, but widely scattered across the city rather than consisting of large areas of completely-demolished property”. A council report of 1944 counted 76 sites of over half an acre “devastated”. The worst in the heart of town were the Bull Ring and Market Hall, and the corner of New Street and High Street known as the Big Top site. The damage was not even serious enough to win special government approval for rebuilding the shops and offices.

Clearing up was itself a kind of demolition. By December 1946 the Public Works Committee had pulled down 1,450 bombed properties and made 600 more safe; by March 1948 the total had reached 6,985.

What the planners did

The peacetime programme was different in kind. In 1947 the council completed the purchase of about 1,400 acres in five inner districts and, over the next quarter-century, cleared and rebuilt them. By the early 1970s, the geographer Phil Jones writes, “almost none of the original buildings” survived. On top of that came the ring road through the centre. No historian has published a count of the buildings it took; its land alone cost £21 million.

The same streets

So which changed Birmingham more? No historian has set the two side by side in figures, and the numbers that exist — houses “affected”, “destroyed”, “beyond repair”, acres bought — measure different things. Larkham warns that different definitions of damage “cause problems for comparison”.

What the evidence does show is that the bombs and the bulldozers often fell on the same streets: the inner belt of slum housing that took most of the bomb damage was the belt the redevelopment areas later cleared. It also shows that the plans came first. Manzoni said so himself in February 1941.

The difference lies in intent. The bombers left a city full of holes. The planners set out to replace the street pattern of whole districts and lay a new road round the centre: on purpose, over twenty-five years, with the approval of the city’s elected council.

People who lived through it still disagree, and so do historians. Below, each gain is set beside a loss on the same theme.

Larkham’s summary of the whole post-war effort is hard to improve on.

But Birmingham’s rebuilding also reached further than any of its rivals’. In the words of the architectural historian Elain Harwood, quoted by Larkham, “Far more of the city was rebuilt than in other big provincial centres like Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds.” Read across each pair and decide for yourself.

Manzoni left a long paper trail: papers for engineers and planners, interviews with historians, and a newspaper interview given in the middle of the Blitz. The quotations gathered here are only those we could trace to a reliable source, in their exact wording. Each one says who recorded it, when and where.

His most famous words, about “tangible links with the past”, need a warning. They are dated 1957 by the council’s own 1989 history, Developing Birmingham, and every later version we found descends from that book. Nobody has yet traced the speech or article in which he first said them.

Some lines that circulate under his name are not here at all. The claim that he wanted buildings to last only fifteen or twenty years has no traceable source, and neither does his supposed creed that cities go out of date like kitchen utensils. Read what he can be shown to have said, and judge him on that.

Doubts from the start

Manzoni’s critics did not need hindsight. In August 1959 a Birmingham Post editorial was headed “Wanted: a Plan for the City Centre”. In October, in the Architects’ Journal, the planner Leslie Ginsburg wrote that the ring road looked “like being the greatest traffic and town design tragedy yet to afflict an English city”. There did not appear, he said, “to have been any real traffic survey”. The city, he argued, should instead “be setting a positive example by replanning the properties under its leasehold control”.

In 1960 the critic Ian Nairn, in the Architectural Review, found the proposed rebuilding of the centre “imposing at a quick look” but “disastrously ham-handed as it appears in the concrete”. In 1964 the architect Owen Luder judged the new Bull Ring unduly dominated by a complex road plan; the lesson, he said, was “that when roads and buildings are integrated in a three-dimensional layout they must be designed at the same time”. The newspapers joined in. One, quoted by Keith Jordan, decided that “Man must have created in central Birmingham one of the most hostile localities on earth.” The planners John Tetlow and Anthony Goss complained that the “pedestrian is treated like a second-class citizen, driven down steps and ramps into subterranean passages”. The architect John Madin, interviewed in the late 1960s, put it most simply.

James Roberts, the architect of the Rotunda, who worked with Manzoni, said decades later that he “had no interest in architecture at all, old, new, nothing at all”.

The admirers

Others were dazzled. Geoffrey Winter of the Yorkshire Post saw Birmingham as “A giant, shedding tattered clothes and struggling into a new suit.” In 1966 Nikolaus Pevsner and Alexandra Wedgwood judged Birmingham under Manzoni and its City Architect “at least as bold” as Coventry, on three times the scale: “The courage in fact of devising a completely new set of roads and open spaces in the very centre of the city is wholly admirable.” In 1971 Colin Buchanan, the prophet of traffic restraint, called the ring road “an example to other towns” for its drive and energy. And in 1974 Sutcliffe and Smith argued that the critics “often failed to understand that the whole project had been planned as a multipurpose venture”.

The argument has never quite ended.

The first retreats

The turn began with the conservationists. The Victorian Society was founded in February 1958 by John Betjeman, Nikolaus Pevsner and others, to defend exactly the kind of buildings Birmingham was pulling down. On 27 July 1967 the Civic Amenities Act let councils protect whole “areas of special architectural or historic interest”: conservation areas.

In 1971, the year the ring road was finished, the council dropped its plan to widen Colmore Row. Larkham links that retreat, and the public campaign against demolishing the Victorian Post Office on Victoria Square, to the moment the city’s direction changed.

Then came the Jewellery Quarter. Its streets of small workshops had been designated a redevelopment area. In January 1980 the council abandoned that and made the Quarter a conservation area instead. The public meeting, the council’s report records, “ended in spontaneous applause”.

Breaking the collar

By the 1980s the city needed a new way to earn its living. In 1987 the council’s City Centre Strategy welcomed housing back into the centre and promised “good pedestrian access”. In March 1988 it invited planners and architects to the Highbury Initiative. In the council’s own later summary, they “recommended that the concrete collar of the Inner Ring Road be broken”.

It was. Centenary Way was lowered. Smallbrook Queensway was brought down to street level at Hill Street and Hurst Street. Subways at Paradise Circus and Newhall Street were filled in. New Street was fully pedestrianised, and the council reported in 2001 that footfall had risen “by over 50 per cent”. Freed from its collar, the council calculated, the city centre had grown in fifteen years “from 80 ha to 800 ha”.

Tearing down the 1960s

Demolition of the 1964 Bull Ring Centre began on 20 June 2000, and on 4 September 2003 a new Bullring opened, restoring, Larkham notes, the direct walk between High Street and Digbeth. In 2002 the elevated Masshouse Circus came down. By 2005 Phil Jones could write that all the elevated sections of the inner ring had gone, and that the post-war legacy was being removed “with very little protest and frequently a good deal of celebration”.

From 2015 the Paradise Circus gyratory was taken apart, and in September 2018 it closed to general traffic. John Madin’s Central Library, opened in 1974 as part of the same scheme, was demolished in 2015–16. The developer behind Paradise now speaks of “recreating lost street patterns”.

Not every reversal was a simple gain. Jones points out that the old 1960s Bull Ring had been conceived as a socially inclusive space, and that the new Bullring moved the market to the edge.

Jones saw the irony.

People and trams come back

The deepest reversal was about who the centre was for. Manzoni’s generation moved people out of the inner districts. The council’s Big City Plan of 2011 aimed to grow the city core by a quarter, with more than 5,000 new homes in its areas of transformation, partly to attract families to live in the centre. Its maps label the Inner Ring Road “the concrete collar”. Across England and Wales, the Centre for Cities found, the populations of large-city centres, Birmingham’s among them, more than doubled between 2001 and 2011.

Birmingham scrapped its last trams in 1953. Light rail returned from Wolverhampton in 1999. Trams reached Centenary Square in December 2019 and ran along Broad Street to Edgbaston from 17 July 2022. Manzoni had planned for cars to stop at the edge of the centre, leaving people to walk the last 300 yards. Now the trams run straight through it.

And on the edge of Eastside, beside the surviving 1838 building of Curzon Street station, HS2 is building a terminus under a 70-metre-wide arched roof that, its builders say, takes its inspiration from “the arched roofs built by the Victorian railway pioneers”.

Drive into Birmingham from the south today and you still use Manzoni’s road. The A38 dives through the tunnels under Suffolk Street, Paradise and Great Charles Street, still the main link, as Phil Jones put it, between the south of the city and the M6. Holloway Circus and Lancaster Circus still turn. Much of the rest has been lowered, filled in or dug up, and the gardens in the Bull Ring that once bore his name have gone too.

His other legacy is harder to see, because it is in people’s homes. Tens of thousands of families left houses without a bath or a lavatory of their own for homes that had both. The back-to-backs that reformers had fought for a century were nearly all gone by the 1960s. Those were real gains, and they should not be forgotten in the rush to condemn the concrete.

But the price was paid in things the plans did not count: neighbourhoods, short cuts, old streets, the feeling of a city that belonged to the people walking through it. The historian Carl Chinn puts the failing precisely, and fairly.

He was not a cartoon villain. He inherited the loop from 1917 and the slums from the nineteenth century. He planned for a car-owning future that duly arrived and a housing crisis that was real, with powers Parliament gave him and councillors who backed him. Whether he was right is still argued over in Birmingham, in pubs, letters pages and planning departments. What is certain is that it took the city half a century to undo much of what he built.

In 1957, by the council’s own later account, Manzoni said there was “little of real worth” in Birmingham’s architecture, and that future generations would be “better occupied in applying their thoughts and energies to forging ahead, rather than looking backward”. Birmingham took him at his word and forged ahead. Then those future generations looked back — at the workshops of the Jewellery Quarter, the last court of back-to-backs, the old street lines under Paradise — and found a great deal there of real worth.

The industrial pioneers built a city of workshops, where guns and jewellery were made a short walk from the houses of the people who made them. A century on, their trades had been overtaken by something bigger.

By 1951, the Victoria County History calculated, 94,400 people in Birmingham worked in the motor trade, 15.1 per cent of everyone in work, with 46,500 more in electrical engineering. “The motor trade dominated Birmingham’s industry in 1951,” it concluded, “far more than did the small arms or jewellery trades in the eighties of the 19th century.” Lucas employed 17,400 people by 1948, a growth “made possible by the expansion of the demand for cars”. Austin at Longbridge, which made 1,500 cars a week in 1934, was making 6,758 a week by 1960. Car makers’ demand, the VCH says, even “created the machine-tool industry in Birmingham”.

So when the council argued for its ring road, it spoke the language of the production line: Lucas’s 300 vehicles crawling across the city at ten miles an hour, small firms in the centre making parts for factories on the edge. The historian David Adams draws the conclusion.

By the late 1960s, Phil Jones writes, the road’s underground dual carriageways had crystallised Birmingham’s “self-image as a ‘car city’”. Yet the VCH was already worried, in 1964, about “too great reliance on the motor industry for employment”.

The worry was justified. Manufacturing employed over 250,000 people in Birmingham at its peak in the mid-1960s; by 2006, the council found, fewer than 56,000 such jobs were left. The car city lost its factories, and then began taking apart its car-city roads.

The pioneers built industrial Birmingham. A century later Manzoni tried to rebuild the city their industries had created, for the age of the motor car those industries had made. In the end Birmingham kept the pioneers’ workshops and took apart much of the engineer’s concrete.