Adventure Playgrounds
Danish landscape architects and town planners became interested in the concept of adventure playgrounds, also known as 'junk playgrounds', in the 1930s, after observing children using building sites and ...
Bath Row (Lee Bank) Redevelopment Area
This map demonstrates the way land was parcelled up, or ‘zoned’, to the south-west of Birmingham’s city centre after the Second World War. Zoning organised units of land for residential, commercial or ...
Birmingham City Council Improvement Committee Minutes
The appointment of the Improvement Committee in July 1875 marked the earliest initiative by the City Council to tackle Birmingham’s slums. The originator of the scheme was the mayor, Joseph Chamberlain, ...
Birmingham City Council Interviewing Sub-Committee Minutes
Using powers conferred by public health and housing legislation, the Improvement Committee had condemned and demolished whole swathes of slum housing and overseen a number of improvements made in central ...
Birmingham City Council Tenants Sub-Committee Minutes
The Tenants Sub-Committee was appointed in November 1922. It reported to the City Estates Committee, its chief function being to deal with applications for municipal housing. Estates Department officials ...
Birmingham Council Minutes, 1839.
Birmingham was not officially ‘incorporated’ as a town until the year 1838. Before this date, there no was official ‘council’, but a ‘Streets and Paving Commissioners Board’ that held limited means of ...
Caravans in Upper Ryland Road
Birmingham’s history is very much a history of migration. Workers from across the region and beyond flocked here to find work in a booming industrial sector during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ...
City of Birmingham Housing Estates
Plan showing location of municipal housing estates in Birmingham in 1931, Weoley Castle situated to the south-west of the city.
Councillor J.S. Nettlefold, J.P.
John Sutton Nettlefold became a key figure in the history of public housing in Birmingham, signalling the growing emergence of local government in the town planning process. Born in London, he later moved ...
Great Colmore Street, Lee Bank
New council flats being built on slum clearance land off Great Colmore Street in the Lee Bank Redevelopment Area.
John Phillips, philanthropist (born 1836)
Between 1851 and 1871, the number of Jewish families living in Edgbaston had increased from two to a hundred - an indication of the growing prosperity of many Jews.1 John Phillips was one of a number ...
Letter from G.H. Browne to Neville Chambelain, MP
Arthur Neville Chamberlain was elected as Conservative-Unionist Member of Parliament for the Birmingham constituency of Ladywood in 1918. He played a leading role in directing national housing policy ...
Letter from Neville Chamberlain to Ida and Hilda [Chamberlain]
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, ...
Letter to Herbert Manzoni, City Engineer and Surveyor
Mr C.B. Parkes, Research Architect at the Bournville Village Trust, reports of a meeting he had with an American architect who had promised to send him the names of other architects who 'have the minds ...
Neville Chamberlain addressing a meeting of the armed forces
This photograph shows Neville Chamberlain addressing a meeting of soldiers at a civic meeting as Lord Mayor of Birmingham, an office to which he was appointed in 1915; Prime Minister David Lloyd George ...
Neville Chamberlain, by Basil Byng
Pencil portrait.
Perambulation of Boundaries of Edgbaston Parish
In October 1872, a group of seventeen men met at the Edgbaston Vestry Hall, and proceeded to Gooch Street to begin a ‘perambulation’ of the boundary of the Edgbaston Parish. The group included Vestry ...
Postcard of the School of Art, Birmingham
This postcard carries a handwritten message from Gertie of Sparkhill to Lily Morris, who was staying in the popular holiday and health resort of Llandudno. At this time the back of the card was reserved ...