REDEVELOPMENT

City policy after World War I was to build housing estates in the green outer suburbs acquired in 1911, and to provide good transport services between them and the industrial Inner Ring. There was demolition of the worst slum courts but little replacement of dwellings: Ashcroft Estate and a few council houses off Mount Street were exceptional. However in 1937, 267 acres of Duddeston and Nechells were designated as a Redevelopment Area: this was less than a third of the total acreage, but more than half of the residential districts, and it included many houses considered unfit for habitation. They were crammed together without open space at densities up to 80 per acre, not counting the factories among them. Work had not begun when the Second World War broke out.

The Town & Country Planning Act of 1944 (the 'Blitz and Blight Act') permitted comprehensive redevelop-ment and a start was made three years later on plans prepared during the war. A new radial road with limited access, Nechells Parkway, was to cut the area into two self-contained 'neighbourhood units', each with its centre and amenities. The worst slums were to be cleared first, and open space to be provided at once.

As some 200 acres were to be green, only half the former number of inhabitants could be rehoused, though most dwellings were to be multi-storey. Of the old streets some were to disappear and others to be truncated to give limited access to the centres. A flatted factory was built on Dartmouth Street to house many small displaced firms: industry and housing were to be strictly segregated. The name 'Nechells Green' was chosen in a competition.

Nechells Green extends from the Digbeth Branch to include all the residential area east of the gas works and railway yards, and is bounded by the Grand Junction line. St. Clement's Redevelopment Area, defined in 1955, includes the rest of Nechells's housing and the former demesne of Duddeston. It is now largely cleared but rebuilding has only begun, south of Nechells Baths, in markedly different style from Nechells Green. That was the first of the City's new towns, and so much of it is a dramatic landscape of towers amid the green so beloved of postwar planners. St. Clement's post-dates the rejection of tall flatblocks, whose social disadvantages outweigh their visual appeal. It will be a district of short terraces and walkways, still with plenty of green, but necessarily having more ground covered by dwellings than has Nechells Green, where they are piled spectacularly on top of each other.

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