Present & Future

52.1. Maps 1

The 40-year Development Plan for the Calthorpe Estate is well advanced. In the thirties came the first changes in a long-static landscape, when two large condominiums of flat blocks were built on Bristol and Hagley Roads. Now the process of greatly increasing Edgbaston's population without destroying its attractiveness has replaced many ugly Victorian piles with cul-de-sacs of small homes landscaped among giant trees. Flat-blocks high and low, shop precincts, the business zone west of Five Ways where monster office blocks harmonise with restored stucco residences, all testify to the success of imaginative planning.

Metchley Park has largely disappeared beneath University City and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and new housing estates. 'Ladywood' was one of the five original Redevelopment Areas, and its transformation from decayed gentility and industrial slumdom is nearly complete. Towers loom over public buildings and amenities : long residential blocks lie amid green mounds and mature trees. The Middleway sweeps through from Five Ways to Spring Hill, separating precincts.

Clearance goes on between Monument Road and the reservoirs, with new terraces alongside refurbished old ones : for a time the Observatory stands as isolated as when first built. Brookfields is largely rebuilt about a green. Boulton Re-development Area (Hockley, All Saints', Gib heath) and the wrongly-named Rotton Park North (Winson Green) are undergoing major clearance, because little is worth preserving, but at Summer-field we see Urban Renewal, the pattern for the future. Closure and truncation of streets, improvement of terraces, create better living without destroying communities.

Prophecies about the coming decades in our school district, made before public spending cuts and child population decline, are now seen to be foolish. Still more Victorian villas will be converted to flats, Asian occupation of Edwardian rows will increase, and there will be little or no new building.

52.2. Map 13

The playing fields are probably safe from overbuilding, and even the City Road allotments may continue to return to nature.

If William Hutton could look at the view from the Observatory's battlements today, as he may have done exactly two hundred years ago, what would he see that was familiar ? Only the circling heights, patches of green, and glimpses of Brindley's canal to remind him of his walks in Rotton Park and round about,