Description:Birmingham’s history is very much a history of migration. Workers from across the region and beyond flocked here to find work in a booming industrial sector during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As workers crowded into the central districts, Birmingham’s commercial and professional elites migrated out of the city to exclusive suburbs, and as the central districts became crammed with unregulated developments of overcrowded back-to-back housing, urban elites who controlled the Council used legislative powers to gradually clear the slums.
Between 1880 and 1939 a gradual exodus of the labouring classes to suburban housing developments both public and private occurred. Commonwealth immigration after 1945 put further pressure on the city’s housing stock. West Indian and Asian migrants tended to settle in suburbs like Sparkbrook and Handsworth, sometimes exploited by unscrupulous landlords who let out overcrowded, run-down houses to vulnerable families. Racial tensions and sympathetic articles highlighting their plight in the press meant that from the late 1950s the Council had to tackle public housing from the point of view of the racially marginalised as much as the economically vulnerable. This would ensure immigrants were treated fairly as solutions to the housing crisis continued to be sought.
Britain’s travelling communities have been with us for centuries, but we would not always expect to see them in the middle of a city as large as Birmingham. A collection of photographs of local traveller sites was recently deposited at Birmingham City Archives, originally taken by <a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1405"> Estates Department</a> staff dealing with traveller evictions. There are views of caravans parked in slum courts to remains of encampments on the fringes of suburban housing estates.
This photograph shows a site at Upper Ryland Street, which formed part of the <a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1487"> Redevelopment Area</a> covering Lee Bank after 1945. The image symbolises the inevitable, advancing tide of urban change taking place at this time, the encampment sandwiched between the remnants of Birmingham’s slums on the left as they were pulled down to make way for the new tower blocks moving in from the right. For the working people who were moved uncertainties may have pressed upon them as they were uprooted from their old communities into new ones. The travellers may have been contemplating the renewed threat of eviction. Even the collection of vehicles appears a transient mixture of old wagons and horses and modern caravans and trucks, a far cry from the idealised nineteenth century painting of the <a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1425">'Gypsy Encampment'</a> at Edgbaston.