Description:At the end of the Second World War public housing had become an increasingly contentious political issue. Both mainstream and fringe parties printed their own solutions for public circulation. Parties on the left hoped to appeal directly to the immediate concerns of returning working-class servicemen who had helped to defeat fascism. In 1945 the Midlands Branch of the British Communist Party published this pamphlet, offering a manifesto that reflected this hybrid of continuity and radical change. Its ideas echoed some of the findings of wartime advisory bodies such as the West Midlands Planning Group and propaganda films such as <a href="http://www.surburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1488">When We Build Again</a>. For example, both believed further suburban growth must be halted to preserve agricultural land and areas of outstanding natural beauty, calling for the complete reconstruction of the inner-city and the improvement of amenities and community facilities on the existing out-of-town estates like Weoley Castle.
Communist attitudes to planning took a more scientific approach, describing how they hoped to build bright, utilitarian homes with combined kitchen-dining rooms and well-fitted bathrooms, similar to those in the artist impressions of <a href="http://www.surburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1471">Reginald Edgecombe</a>. Socialists saw the logistical and technological leaps made in the realms of science, engineering and town planning during wartime being realigned during the peacetime ‘battle’ to rebuild. Yet the gendered demarcation of internal space had more in common with the ideals expressed by earlier, more conservative housing reformers and the pages of the <a href="http://www.surburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1413">Moor Pool News</a>. For example, kitchens would be full of the latest technological innovations that would save the ‘working-class housewife’ from ‘household drudgery’, expressing a long-held view that such chores were a woman’s duty in the first place!
Communists differed from mainstream political opinion as regards ownership of land for house building purposes, favouring the wholesale nationalisation of land. The pamphlet appears remarkably free of class-war rhetoric, but the section ‘Where Shall We Build’ shown here was particularly scathing in its condemnation of the exclusive suburb of Edgbaston, the ‘biggest anomaly of all in the structure of Birmingham.’ The Calthorpe family were identified as having blocked successive attempts by the Council to develop land on the estate for the benefit of all [<a href="http://www.surburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1398">letter from Mr Bloxham</a>]. What was proposed might have appeared as a call to tear down of the vestiges of the old order and build a revolutionary working-class suburb in its place. Old villas were to be replaced with modern flats surrounded by communal lawns and parks, arguing ‘Birmingham cannot allow this area to remain the exclusive and untouchable domain of the rich at the expense of congested Ladywood, Winson Green, Handsworth, etc.’