Victorian Birmingham: the town remade

In 1731 William Westley drew a map of Birmingham. It shows a compact town: the green that became the Bull Ring, St Martin’s Church, and a handful of streets running up the sandstone ridge. By 1801 the census counted 73,670 people. The town had not grown outwards so much as filled up.

A Georgian town

The Victoria County History explains why. Much of the land around the old town was tied up by its owners, the Colmores, Phillipses and Inges, under settlements that allowed only short leases. One landlord, Dr Sherlock, refused building leases altogether, because, he said, “his successor, at the expiration of the term, would have the rubbish to carry off”.

Growth came in jumps, each one unlocked by a private Act of Parliament. The Colmore estate Act of 1746 opened the ridge between Easy Hill and Snow Hill to small manufacturers of buttons, buckles and steel toys. On the old priory land John Pemberton laid out the Square, later Old Square, in about 1713: sixteen near-identical brick houses with pedimented doorways. It was the smartest address in town.

Courts and back-to-backs

Behind the street fronts, the town packed itself in. Because the old burgage plots were long and narrow, new houses went up on the “backsides”, reached through covered entries into courts. At Anderton Square, off Whittall Street, built about 1776, each house had a cellar and three rooms stacked one above another, with the privies in a corner of the yard. A report to the General Board of Health in 1849 found many courts “closely-built, narrow and ill-ventilated”.

The railways began the clearing. In the 1850s, says the VCH, “buildings were cleared to construct the two central stations at New Street and Snow Hill”, displacing a large part of the central population. Birmingham, incorporated as a borough by charter on 31 October 1838, was now a big, unhealthy industrial town with a weak council.

Chamberlain’s three years

That changed in November 1873, when Joseph Chamberlain, a wealthy screw manufacturer, became mayor. On 13 January 1874 the council voted by 54 to 2 to buy the two private gas companies. Chamberlain then went after the waterworks. On 4 December 1874 he told the council that magistrates hated convicting poor people for stealing water: “They might almost as well be convicted for stealing air.” An Act of 1875 transferred the works to the corporation.

Then came the boldest plan. In 1875 the Artisans’ Dwellings Act, piloted through Parliament by the Home Secretary, Richard Cross, let councils buy and clear unhealthy districts. Chamberlain opened his “grand design” to the council at the end of July 1875. On 12 October he asked them to show “a sagacious audacity”. They adopted it. The powers were confirmed in August 1876.

Corporation Street

The scheme took in 93 acres of St Mary’s and Market Hall wards, which the VCH calls “the worst district in the town”. Through the middle went a new street, twenty-two yards wide, which Chamberlain liked to call a “boulevard”. The first part of Corporation Street opened in 1879. In 1882 Old Square, the Georgian showpiece, was largely destroyed to make way for it.

The public-health results were real. In nine streets in the area the death rate fell from 53.2 per thousand in 1873–75 to 21.3 in 1879–81. Chamberlain, writing to his friend Jesse Collings on 6 June 1876 as he left for Parliament, could boast that the town would be “parked, paved, assized, marketed, Gas-and-Watered and improved”.

Who paid

The people who lived there paid most. The corporation’s official history records that by June 1885 only 62 houses had been rebuilt, while 653 had been pulled down or closed. An inquiry in 1884 decided there was no shortage of cheap houses, so plans for council housing were shelved. Only in 1889–91 did the corporation build cottages in Ryder Street and Lawrence Street, at rents the historian Chris Upton says were “well beyond the pocket of most of those who had formerly lived in the area”. His verdict: “Chamberlain had in truth engineered a commercial quarter under the umbrella of a housing act.” *The Dart*, a hostile Liberal weekly, put it more sharply, mocking a plan to lower the death rate by making sure “no person” was left living there.

Even the boulevard fell short. Upton notes that the slump of the early 1880s stopped the shops and offices halfway; the lower end filled with public buildings instead. The finest is the Victoria Law Courts, won in competition by Aston Webb and Ingress Bell. Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone on 23 March 1887 and it opened in 1891, in red brick and terracotta. It is listed Grade I.

The city

On 14 January 1889 Letters Patent made Birmingham a city. Above Victoria Square rose Yeoville Thomason’s Council House of 1874–79 and the Museum and Art Gallery behind it. When Joseph Southall painted Corporation Street in March 1914, it looked as though it had always been there.

It had not. Every Victorian street in the centre was cut through somebody’s home, and the men who did it said so openly. That is the pattern the rest of Birmingham’s story follows: a council confident enough to remake its own town, and a city that has argued ever since about what that cost.