URBANISATION

By 1810 streets between the south bound and the Digbeth Branch were nearly complete with terraces. Duke and Woodcock Streets were earliest to appear and be developed. Prospect and Belmont Rows, Holte, Howe, Lister and Heneage Streets and Love Lane were building: Dartmouth Street was projected but not laid. It was partly developed by 1833, when Great Lister Street had appeared as a new highway across Duddeston. The Ashted streets were extended to meet it. Aston Church Road and Holborn Hill now crossed central Nechells.

The 1854 map shows a small gas works off Windsor Street, and the short streets west of it. Cromwell Street and Long Acre make a new ridgeway, but the latter is not yet made up.

Broadmoor Pool has been drained but not overbuilt. Steedman's allotments are overlain by Cromwell, Scholefield, and three short cross streets. The Benton Farms have been sold: Mount Street/Nechells Street along the east side of the ridge parallels Long Acre along the west, and some of the cross streets to Nechells Park Road have been made along old hedge lines. Duddeston demesne is being developed on both sides of the Grand Junction Railway. Population in the hamlets is over 30,000. Two decades later there are ten gasholders at Windsor Street and one off Nechells Place. Cheston Road has been laid along the Aston Brook meadows and Avenue Road cuts across them.

Apart from a few short streets and some off-street terraces, the residential pattern was complete by 1880. Still rural were the valley meadows on three sides, with their mills. During the next four decades these early industrial sites were to be absorbed into continuous factory areas. The Fazeley Canal was lined with works buildings throughout its length in Duddeston and Nechells, but the Junction Canal was accessible only in northmost Nechells. Canal and railway wharves supplied coal for scores of steam engines: electric power began to replace these early this century, and the first temporary generating station was opened between canal and sewage works in 1915. The great permanent station was completed in 1929.

Much conversion of houses, and their replacement by workshops, infilling of sites with 'courts', pollution of air by smoke and smell and of ground by midden and cesspool, lack of fresh water, all combined to turn the wards of a century ago into disease-ridden slums.

Improvement was slow. From the making of Salford Reservoir in 1831 piped water was available if it could be afforded: Birmingham Corporation bought out the Company in 1873 and during the next twenty years greatly increased the supply of water from local sources while extending mains and pipes to every court if not to every dwelling. The arrival of Welsh water made possible the ultimate provision of flush toilets, and when Nechells Baths were opened a deep well on-site was not needed as at earlier buildings. Population reached its peak in 1901, 65,572, and had declined through demolitions (mostly for industry) to less than sixty thousand by 1911.

Industry was always mixed in size of unit and product. Tangye's Works in Mount Street, producing machine tools, employed 500 people, but there were many small firms as well as large ones like Stuart, Essex, and Plume. Brassfounding, matches, many branches of light engineering, the gas works and the railways, were large employers of local labour.