Description:Using powers conferred by public health and housing legislation, the <a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1406"> Improvement Committee</a> had condemned and demolished whole swathes of slum housing and overseen a number of improvements made in central Birmingham during the period 1875-1900. Concerns were raised that clearances exceeded the building of high-quality artisans’ dwellings that replaced them, and a new Housing Committee was appointed in 1901, which sat until 1911. Its powers were largely identical to its predecessor’s, but extended beyond the Improvement Area to the rest of Birmingham.
The committee minutes chart key developments in municipal housing policy in Birmingham during the early twentieth century and the inexorable progress of slum clearance works. Detailed transcripts of meetings between municipal officials, developers and property owners highlight tensions existing between different interest groups and the difficulties the Council had obtaining land and property at a reasonable price, whilst appeasing and compensating those affected. The process of interviewing landlords and property owners and the inspection of property is well detailed in the minutes of various sub-committees.
This extract from the minutes of the Interviewing Sub-Committee includes correspondence from a Mr. H.M. Goodman, who owned a number of back-to-back properties in Cheapside. Goodman felt such an ‘extravagantly high standard’ imposed on his property (<a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1481">Court</a> 6) would ‘ultimately result in the closing of every house of this class and private capitalists will certainly not replace them.’ He went on to add that such measures would be ‘a great injustice to those owners who do their best for their tenants’ as well as proving ‘most impolitic in the interests of their tenant’, not to mention ratepayers like himself who would ultimately have to pay for re-housing those displaced.
Goodman refused to comply until he had met officials to discuss the matter further. Unfortunately no further minutes exist that describe how the matter was concluded. Both suburban and privately-built working-class housing developments such as the Bordesley Green Estate, numbering some 620 homes, did not keep up with demolition works. As early as June 1908, 4,352 houses in central Birmingham were classed as unfit, of which 1,213 had been demolished. The cessation of large-scale house building after the outbreak of war on 1 August 1914 and a surge in the city’s population by some 25,000 just before the war meant that for the first time in its history, Birmingham was in imminent danger of a housing shortage.<small><sup>1</sup></small>
<font color="#666633"><small><sup>1</sup> C.A. Vince, History of the Corporation of Birmingham volume IV 1900-1915 (Birmingham: Cornish Brothers, 1923), pp.188-9, 198-9</small></font>