Re-Development Areas - 'New Towns'
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The Development Plan defined 5 areas totalling 1400 acres for comprehensive clearance and reconstruction. 30,000 houses, 2500 shops, and 2000 factories were to be demolished, and even the street pattern was to be drastically altered. This was a 20-year plan, and in late '72 it is near completion, while demolition in 15 other areas of similar total acreage is well advanced. Redevelopment has followed these principles: segregation of land use, separation of traffic and pedestrians, grouping of amenities in central positions with peripheral access only to the estates, grouping of industry in and about existing modern factory concentrations, varied housing from bungalows and terraces to multi-storey towers, ribbons of open space, valley parkways, lakes and mature transplanted trees, visually stimulating vistas. The 5 original areas, whose names were decided in a public competition were:- NECHELLS GREEN (Duddeston and Nechells) 267 acres
55.1. Map 33a To these was added the Jewellery Quarter, between Ladywood and Newtown. Most of the Inner Ring was thus scheduled for redevelopment, and 15 other areas have been designated (about 1400 acres) which will mean that all slums, and nearly all pre-1890 dwellings, will have been demolished by 1990. BOULTON includes Winson Green, south Handsworth, and Summerfield: ST.CLEMENT'S includes north Nechells and Saltley, and ST.ANDREW'S includes Bordesley Green, Bordesley and Camp Hill, and part of Small Heath. Other areas like Harborne, Stirchley, and central Handsworth will have their turn, but in these and others (9 areas - 5,600 dwellings) the aim will be improvement, restoration and provision of modern amenities. It has been recognised that `new towns' lack community spirit (centres have been provided and equipped to foster this), and improvement will not destroy but enhance local loyalty. 12 areas, such as Kings Norton and Yardley villages, have been scheduled for conservation. The long-projected Inner Ring Road was begun in the late 50's with Smallbrook Ringway and St. Martin's Circus which involved the demolition of the Market Hall. As the traffic grew, so the character of the ringway had to be changed: instead of a throughway and shopping street, it has become an expressway on stilts or in a tunnel, with complex inter- changes, and pedestrians are banished below ground. If prewar Birmingham was famous for its arcades (carried to logical conclusions in the two great shopping precincts of the Bull Ring Centre and New Street Station) the City in the '70's must be infamous for its subways. The circuses are welcome oases of calm, some to be linked by traffic-free streets. Changes in street-patterns have changed routes of human movement: if new shops are not on the way to out-of-centre car-parks, they do not pay. Corporation Square has had to start an open market to attract customers to this dead end. The Ringway was complete in 1971, and was named Queensway by mistake, as only the tunnel through the ridge was intended to be so named. It is two miles long and links 8 radials which are the final concentration of a score. The 'new towns' are to be linked by the 6½ mile Middleway at roughly one mile from the centre. When complete it will be a dual carway, largely on the line of existing streets, with underpasses and flyovers at radial crossings. The only ones completed by 1972 are at Five Ways, Hockley Brook, and Aston Expressway. The Outer Ring Road, 26 miles, was under construction in '39, but remains part dual carway, part suburban road and village street, with only two (Birchfield and Coventry Road) of twenty major junctions yet provided with flyovers. M5 goes north-south through Quinton, and M6 crosses the northern suburbs: they meet at Ray Hall in West Bromwich. M42 is planned to cross north Worcs. and Warks. south of the City. Aston Expressway, first of the planned fast routes from Queensway to the motorways was opened in '72. It crosses ASTON Redevelopment Area and joins M6 at the Salford multiple interchange locally known as 'Spaghetti Junction'. The Western Expressway will use the Bourn Brook/ Woodgate Valley route through the bed of Harborne Reservoir. The line of the southern way, to link up with the Wythall Bypass, is not yet finally decided, but probably both Moseley and Kings Heath will be bypassed by it. A junction is planned at Camp Hill for the eastern way, which will link up with Coventry Road beyond Bordesley, and may be elevated on stilts beyond the 'Swan' underpass. The radial roads serve as throughways, access routes, and shopping streets, three incompatible uses. They can be bypassed like Erdington High Street, a '30's project, leaving it for shoppers, there can be restricted access to them as on the expressway, or they can be replaced throughout their City length. Parking can be restricted as it is on most radials, new shops can be set back to provide a service road and forecourt. But the total separation of car and pedestrian, shopper and traveller, is the only complete if astronomically expensive answer . Refused 'New Towns' beyond the Green Belt in the 50's, Birmingham built them on its own land. Shard End, Castle Vale, Kingshurst, Chelmsley Wood, (the last two outside the City and the last not yet complete), and estates large and small in many areas but especially in Northfield and Kings Norton, have made great inroads into the waiting lists for houses, but demolition, immigration, and earlier marriage keep the demand steady. Overspill to Daventry, Tamworth, etc., and the development since the 60's of Telford and Redditch have caused a net decline in population. The Calthorpe Estate, still firmly in the hands of the Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpes, has its own redevelopment plan. Victorian mansions are being demolished and their spacious grounds overbuilt with flats, 'town houses', and office blocks: small shopping precincts are provided, but industry is still not permitted. |
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