A legacy of the industrial age created a haphazard urban jungle
OUR parks and open spaces are very important ingredients that help placate the somewhat claustrophobic lifestyle of living in the urban jungle.
We can also escape via the means of public and private transport at our disposable, helping to replace the grey of concrete with the green of the countryside. But looking back in time our ancestors were for the most part anchored into a lifestyle that was surrounded by terraced houses which rubbed shoulders with archaic factories and derelict open spaces only fit for adventure by children outside of school.
Mining and ironworking had made its mark on the Black Country landscape long before the start of the Industrial Revolution. But the expansion of manufacturing created a huge migration of people from rural areas into the expanding towns.
There wasn’t a great deal of time to plan the building of houses and new factories in an orderly way and this inevitably led to a haphazard relationship between where people lived and where they worked. As time progressed the demand for factory premises forced the conversion of many dwelling houses to the purposes of manufacture.
When the planners of the new West Midlands conurbation sat down to talk tactics after the Second World War, they were confronted with a legacy of the industrial age that had created a disfunctional urban jungle. Redevelopment had to be carefully considered, firstly laying down the zones in which new or re-built factories had to be located, and secondly determining which existing areas were in need of clearing.
Buildings were classified into 3 categories.
(1) Buildings suffering from age or bad structural conditions to such an extent as to justify their immediate replacement under a replanning scheme. Included in this class were houses converetd into workshops and offices, and the old narrow workshops erected in the 19th century, with low ceilings, timber floors and inadequate natural lighting,
(2) Buildings appearing to be reasonably satisfactory in “fair-to-good” structural condition that possessed one or more of the characteristics of the first category to such an extent that replacement would be required within the next 30 years.
(3) Buildings which are good industrial premises, structurally sound and not likely to fall below these standards within the next 30 years. Included in this class were most of the factories built since 1914.
There were many factories that covered vast swathes of land which caused their own individual problems. Some covered an area up to a square mile, becoming virtually towns within themselves, invariably crisscrossed by canals and railway tracks. In these cases the planners had to survey each individual building within the confines of the factory complex.
Congested
The survey of factories extended over nearly half the total area of the conurbation and covered the following towns:- Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Wednesfield, Bilston, Oldbury, West Bromwich, Smethwick, Halesowen, Lye, Wollescote, parts of Sutton Coldfield, Brierley Hill, Rowley Regis and Cradley.
It highlighted the scale of the problem and found that factory slums were most often found in the congested central areas of towns, usually converted houses, narrow small-windowed workshops with low ceilings and timber floors, or more modern buildings of a ramshackle construction and in a bad state of maintenance.
The accopmpanying pictures show the problems that had built up to a point where something extreme had to be done and gradually the slums were demolished and the derelict land cleared to lay the foundations of the modern Black Country we all live and work in today.