Description:As Minister of Health, Neville Chamberlain was instrumental in legislating for affordable housing in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. Housing subsidies were later extended to municipal housing schemes, allowing councils to build cost-effectively. Such projects also provided employment for workmen who had lost jobs during the economic downturn which took hold after 1930. Chamberlain’s vision marked an important change in the attitude of his family to public housing. His father believed working-class housing should actually be built by private contractors. With encouragement from Joseph’s heir, by 1939 Birmingham would become amongst the largest providers of council housing in the country.
This amusing letter from Neville Chamberlain, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, describes a visit to Weoley Castle to open Birmingham’s 40,000th council house on 23 October 1933. Chamberlain seems more absorbed with the dignitaries and ceremonial aspect of the day, and any council tenants, who we assume were present, are not mentioned:
<blockquote>We…drove out to Weoley Castle and saw the Estate which is delightfully laid out on modern lines and finally arrived at the site where we found a considerable crowd of Councillors […] (I recognised an old friend who was a charge hand at Elliotts). There the L[or]d Mayor delivered an address and invited me to open the house</blockquote>
The surveyor walked towards the door with a gilt key which he dropped, and on recovering the key the door refused to open! After finally opening the house, Chamberlain was presented with ‘an ivory and silver cigar box decorated with views of the Estate and the house.’ Some may have looked back at the glitches as symbolising a wider failure of municipal housing policy. In the inter-war period over 110,000 houses had been built in Birmingham, creating a suburban outer-ring of houses greater than the entire city as it existed in 1918. 200,000 people were re-housed in new 50,000 municipal homes.<small><sup>1</sup></small> Yet, despite these achievements, continued population expansion and intensified slum clearance works meant there was still a housing shortage.
Earlier that day, Chamberlain visited a new development of maisonettes in the city centre, with flat building and slum reconditioning projects in central Birmingham also being looked into.<small><sup>2</sup></small> With the preservation of Green Belt land temporarily checking further expansion on the city’s south-western fringes, the construction of <a href="http://www.surburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1473">tower blocks</a> near the city centre, not the development of suburban housing estates, would provide the cornerstone of local housing policy after 1945.
<font color="#666633"><small><sup>1</sup> Joseph McKenna, Birmingham. The Building of a City (Stroud: Tempus Publishing Ltd., 2005), pp.97-8
<sup>2</sup> Margaret Fenter, Copec Adventure, the Story of Birmingham Copec House Improvement Society, with a forward by Sir Parker Morris (Birmingham: Copec House Improvement Society, 1960), pp.7-12</small></font>