Description:Much of the new accommodation built after 1945 for the purposes of re-housing comprised increasingly taller, high-density tower blocks, many built in the five <a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1487">Redevelopment Areas</a>. They also rose across more underdeveloped south-west suburbs like Northfield, whilst outlying towns like Frankley and Rubery were simultaneously developed to cope with overspill. This page is from an academic research paper by Anna Robinson, one of many studies on the effects of flat life on their inhabitants undertaken during the 1950s and beyond. Robinson interviewed 100 parents who lived in tower blocks in Birmingham, highlighting problems that were eventually identified as common elsewhere.
Many were happy with their flats, but one major problem identified was the inadequate space within the flats for children to play.<small><sup>1</sup></small> In one apartment the children were clustered around a television in the lounge with the curtains drawn and the windows closed, despite being sunny. Central heating was sometimes kept on even during the summer months.<small><sup>2</sup></small> Many children were growing up pale and often unable to leave the house and socialise in the streets. Robinson clearly feared for the mental health of parents and children, noting the onset of certain nervous conditions and neurotic disorders, particularly amongst women beside themselves with being confined inside for long periods surrounded by screaming children, as this page demonstrates:
One young mother, who has been living in the flat only six weeks, was nearly at her wits’ end with two children […] The garden cannot be supervised from upstairs. The older child […] started biting the younger one, as her activities were curtailed through this two-year-old brother wanting to go wherever she went’.<small><sup>3</sup></small>
Outside, the vast lawns were often emblazoned with ‘Keep off the Grass’ signs, photographs in the study illustrating instances where angry residents had turned the signs to face the walls, another sign of defiance toward Council officials that a 1955 newspaper article suggested was widespread in tower blocks in Duddeston and Nechells, Robinson herself having been reprimanded by a caretaker for leaving her bike on the lawns.<small><sup>4</sup></small> Other studies meanwhile suggested community facilities for adults in general were as underdeveloped as they were in the suburban council estates, at least at first.<small><sup>5</sup></small> Robinson sympathised with the families she interviewed, passionately advocating the young as potential winners or losers of public housing. Her investigation marked an early example of increasingly polemical, anti-establishment studies looking at the municipal housing strategies of local government, the most recent being Lynsey Hanley’s Estates: an intimate history, published in 2007.
<font color="#666633"><small><sup>1</sup> Anna M. Robinson, The effect of flat dwelling on children, and on their parents, and the role of the nursery school in relation to this problem, a dissertation prepared for Diploma in the Psychology of Childhood, Birmingham University, 1957-58 (Birmingham: Anna M. Robinson, 1958), pp.3-4, 19
<sup>2</sup> Ibid., 7
<sup>3</sup> Ibid., 29
<sup>4</sup> Ibid., 13-14; '"Concentration camp" taunt at flats', Birmingham News, 25 June 1955
<sup>5</sup> John P. Macey, City of Birmingham Housing Manager, Problems of flat life. Photocopy of lecture given at Public Works & Municipal Services Congress, 12th (London: Solicitors Law Stationery Society Ltd., 1958), pp.8-9</small></font>