Description:The West Midland Group for Post-War Planning and Reconstruction was a consultative body affiliated to the University of Birmingham, and included academics, city planners like Sir Herbert Manzoni, the City Engineer and Surveyor to Birmingham, and George W. Cadbury of the Bournville Village Trust. The group worked on the recommendations of the Council to Promote the Planning of Social Environment of February 1940, and the associated Barlow and Scott Reports, to research post-war planning solutions for the region, despite the threat of a Nazi invasion. Its four sub-committees considered all aspects regional planning policy, including land use, industrial development, urban housing, and social services. Some members of the committee had a more bludgeoning attitude than others. A letter by C.B. Parkes, Research Architect at the Bournville Village Trust, referred to a meeting with someone who promised to provide names of architects who ‘have the minds of “bulldozers”' (<a href="http://www.surburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1478">Manzoni file</a>).
The need to co-ordinate local authorities at a regional level and regulate the interests of urban and rural areas marked a key development in the history of the administration of Birmingham and the West Midlands. There was general consensus that towns like Birmingham as far as the Lickey Hills to the south-west had spread out far too quickly, which now formed part of a protective ‘Green Belt'.<small><sup>1</sup></small> Numerous research projects were undertaken, and the Group published a number of pamphlets and books on the subject, even organising public exhibitions. These also served a propaganda purpose, to stimulate ‘public awareness of the need to plan[…]so that the planners in their work may have the positive directives of a public prepared not only to know what they want, but also how to express their needs'.<small><sup>2</sup></small>
Most radical of the proposals toyed with by the Land Tenure Committee are described in this report, in which national and regional planning programmes were ‘dependent upon some far reaching system of State control of the use of land’ (<a href="http://www.surburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1414">Homes for Birmingham</a>). This never became an actuality, but it was eventually stipulated in the Uthwatt Report of 1942 that compensation for land purchased for redevelopment be granted at pre-1939 land prices. This caused unease amongst property owners and vested interests in parliament. The debate between private and public sector interests as regards the rights and responsibilities of the individual versus the obligations and requirements of the State to intervene in a society that was becoming increasingly complex was one which resonated throughout the political debates of the 1950s and 1960s, and continues to this day.
<font color="#666633"><small><sup>1</sup> Kenneth E. Rosing and Peter A. Wood, Character of a Conurbation: a Computer Atlas of Birmingham and the Black Country (London: University of London Press, 1966), p.25
<sup>2</sup> Records of the West Midland Group for Post-War Reconstruction and Planning, ‘G. Cadbury file’, 3 November 1941 [UBSC: WMG/1/BOX/2/2</small></font>