Description:The Edgecombe drawings demonstrate that urban planners in Birmingham were considering the internal layout as much as the external appearance of new houses. This sketch illustrates the creative processes that informed the thoughts of men like Edgecombe and Manzoni, an intriguing blend of elegant furniture and fittings neatly arranged in what looks like a spacious, bright modern apartment.
If the sketch was meant to represent what the interior of a new, working-class municipal home would look like, it was an extremely idealistic vision. None of the furniture, particularly the bureau on the far wall and the candelabra hanging from the ceiling, bears any resemblance to what these interiors generally looked like (<a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1402">photograph by Bill Brandt</a>), and appear more like the sort of features that might appear in the grand suburban villas in Edgbaston (<a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1430">‘The Sitting Room’</a>). The beamed ceilings show a rustic influence that may have been informed by the Bournville Village Trust housing design. Combinations of old and new features might be symbolic of the differing ideals of the members of the West Midlands Planning Group (<a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1478">Manzoni file</a>). Here champions of the more conservative Garden Suburb ideal such as George Cadbury had sometimes heated debates with more modern and radical realists like Manzoni as to what urban spaces in the West Midlands should look like after 1945.
Another illustration in the collection shows <a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1472">a design for single storey dwellings for aged people by Manzoni</a>. This design shows a much more conventional, post-war interior, cosy and well fitted with functional furniture, utilitarian, fully-fitted bathroom and kitchen, and the ubiquitous wireless which by the late 1940s had become a standard fixture in most working-class homes. The interspersing of old people’s bungalows, lines of maisonette flats and more conventional council housing were intended to vary the appearance of the vast tower block estates that began to rise above Redevelopment Zones at Lee Bank, and later, the suburbs.
It soon became apparent that men like Manzoni had gained the upper hand in the debates on post-war planning, the geometrically rigid, block like appearance of the old persons’ flat presenting a permanence that contrasted with Edgecombe’s wispy sketch of the domestic interior, now a fleeting image. Tower blocks were seen as the most efficient means of fighting the housing shortage, but they had many critics. For example, the imposition of varied housing construction on these new estates still seemed artificially-imposed, whilst an increasing number of social studies during the late 1950s and 1960s also began to look at the effects of living in flats on young families, children and the elderly (<a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1411">‘The effect of flat dwelling on children’</a>).