Description:Despite massive municipal building schemes of the inter-war years, the housing crisis was more pressing in Birmingham in 1945 than 1918. Recent housing surveys revealed an unacceptable 50,000 properties remained unfit for human habitation.<small><sup>1</sup></small> Wartime bombing destroyed much of central Birmingham’s housing stock with many families made homeless. With the passing of the Town and Country Act, 1944, the Council had greater powers to acquire land by compulsory purchase on five new redevelopment areas on 1,000 acres of land covering over 30,000 houses, of which over half were of the back-to-back type.<small><sup>2</sup></small> By the end of 1950 most were in the hands of the Council. Unfortunately economic necessity and the high cost of scarce building materials meant little actual demolition was carried out until 1952. Ad hoc emergency measures had to be employed instead, including slum reconditioning projects or constructing pre-fabricated dwellings across the city.
This photograph provides a graphic example of slum housing on Alma Terrace, Highgate, forming part of the redevelopment areas at <a href="http://www.surburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1487">Lee Bank</a> on the south western fringes of the city bounding Edgbaston. Many such properties were inhabited, although it is doubtful this one was as the buildings toward the right of the court appear to be propped up with wooden struts. The presence of the Victorian lamp post attests the degree to which some back-to-backs had survived virtually unchanged since the mid-nineteenth century. The graffiti written on the wall of the building to the right is particularly arresting. Messages such as ‘Glad to see you Dad’ and a large ‘V’, possibly a victory sign, appear to have been written by slum children for relatives returning from the war. Although the photograph is undated, it may have been taken as part of evidence-gathering investigations into slum housing towards the end of the Second World War, or after.
Many working-class servicemen would have returned to neighbourhoods like this, and a historical summary of redevelopment work to date in the City Council archive declared: ‘Immediately after the war, public opinion strongly favoured tackling the problems of peace by the same vigorous and drastic measures as were used for carrying through major military operations’.<small><sup>3</sup></small> Thus city planners now felt as the West Midlands Group had that the mobilisation of labour and resources to tackle the housing question would require almost military planning.
<font color="#666633"><small><sup>1</sup> Reconstruction Committee Minutes, 3 June 1942 [BA&H: BCC 1/EB/1/1/1]
<sup>2</sup> Anthony Sutcliffe and Roger Smith, History of Birmingham volume III: Birmingham 1939-1970 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p.225
<sup>3</sup> Housing Management Committee Minutes, 17 January 1961 [BA&H: BCC 1/CY/1/1/21] </small></font>