Description:This map illustrates one of Birmingham’s first comprehensive town planning schemes to regulate suburban development in south-west Birmingham. What is remarkable when comparing it to maps from just 20 years previously is how quickly the rural landscape became engulfed by urban sprawl. Such growth informed the mindset of city planners like <a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1418"> J.S. Nettlefold</a> trying to control the development of green space. Housing reformers hoped to remedy the unregulated growth of densely built terraced housing during the late nineteenth century, in favour of spacious dwellings with gardens. The map also puts into perspective the variety of housing in Harborne, evidence of a more haphazard pattern of growth than occurred at nearby Edgbaston.
In this section, long terraces line streets like Gordon Road, reflecting earlier building projects opened by new tramlines and railways offering convenient commuter access to the city. The more socially mixed Moor Pool Estate lies westward, the experimental evidence of Nettlefold’s vision of the ideal working-class community. To the north-east are the huge villas of Edgbaston’s middle classes, the area’s perceived exclusivity increasingly threatened by the encroaching suburbs nearby. As these began to envelop Edgbaston, the Calthorpe family and residents took pains to ensure the tranquillity of their world was maintained in this ‘dynamic urban context’.<small><sup>1</sup></small> The 1913 scheme only encompassed very little of Edgbaston, concentrating lines of development on the two neighbouring suburbs. And unlike the East Birmingham plan approved that year, industrial development was prohibited, ensuring factory smoke and dirt were kept leeward of Edgbsaton.<small><sup>2</sup></small>
Edgbaston was nonetheless reliant on Harborne’s working-class population as a source of domestic labour. Alf Waldron, a working-class resident of Gordon Road, later recounted that his mother worked in domestic service in a big Edgbaston house. His wife <a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1469">Mabel A. Waldron</a> remembered Harborne’s steam laundries, such as the large one located on the map near the railway bridge, saying there were ‘a lot of gentry in those days in Edgbaston who used to send the laundry’ to them. Edgbaston, meanwhile, provided a model for some developments in Harborne. The tree layouts for the narrow avenues of the Moor Pool Estate were designed by the Curator of Edgbaston’s <a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1394">Botanical Gardens</a>, and the estate newsletter was to some extent modelled on the <a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1454"> Edgbastonia</a>. Suburban spaces were increasingly contested spaces as they expanded, but at the same time became ‘neighbours’ through mutual reliance upon each other.
<font color="#666633"><small><sup>1</sup>David Cannadine, Lords and landlords: the aristocracy and towns 1774-1967 (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1980), pp.110-12
<sup>2</sup> East Birmingham Town Planning Scheme map, 1913 [BA&H: BCC 1/AO/D/2/7/4/1/1]</small></font>