A CIVIC SENSE IN ENGLAND?
BIRMINGHAM REVISITED.
ALETTER to the Spectator, and an extremely inter- esting pamphlet from the Birmingham Civic Society, sent Inc to revisit that city and to try to see it afresh. To begin with the Society's preamble seemed to me extremely attractive, and to strike just the right note in its realization of the deficiencies of the present, and its sane and moderate hopes for the future. Here, too, is a statement of the " mining-camp " evil which could not be bettered :— " Nothing in our modern civilization has been more mischievously under-estimated than the influence of the physical aspects of a town upon the spiritual and moral life of its community. People who resent the dirt and ugliness in which a commercialized society has environed its common life are at present forced to make their own private refuge where they can indulge their instinct for decent and beautiful surroundings. This is evil ; a citizen's home should be beautiful, but it should be so as a happy contribution of the indi- vidual to a beautiful city. Instead of making a tolerable seclusion for himself with what taste he can, the citizen ought to look upon it as an honourable obligation to make his home worthy of the city that sets a clean and noble standard of comeliness. At present it is impossible for him to do this, since his city is mean and unlovely. The aim of the Birmingham Society will be always to keep in mind this ideal of a regenerate city. Its members will realize that sweeping schemes of reconstruction cannot suddenly be executed, but they will remember too that such reconstruction, however slowly it may be achieved, is the only hope of making the city we live in a monument to anything but our carelessness and greed."
This admirable statement of general principles is followed in the pamphlet by illustrations of such various things as a dignified, well-printed cover for the town's telephone book, plans for the laying out of public gardens (one to provide an informal outdoor theatre), and an account of several activities from experiments in smoke abatement to the regulation of public rejoicings. Mr. William Hay- wood, the well-known architect who is the honorary secretary and prime mover of the Society, was good enough to take me for a long tour of the town and also to explain in detail the activities of the Society, and the ingenious organization by which it works in conjunction with the regular civic authorities. The organization is worked on the principle of advisory committees, on which the local authority concerned is represented, and the Society thus has the trust and cordial co-operation of the various official departments. But Mr. Haywood was able to show me things of which he and the Society ought to be proud : that is to say, not merely reports and memoranda, however excellent, but actual men, with palpable spades and barrows, laying out paths, putting down turf, and planting trees, and all with the object of turning an ugly, unrestful and berailed public garden into a beautiful place, the appropriate setting for the intricate rich beauty of Aston Hall, which spreads its walls and towers on a piece of rising ground in the middle of this garden.
The same sort of thing has been done on a smaller scale at Salford Park, where, instead of a Tudor Palace, a small sheet of water is the chief feature of the design. In each case tennis courts and sports grounds are provided, and the entrances and boundaries of the parks have been carefully considered. In the case of another small ground a close holly hedge with no additional fence has been used as a boundary.
But the Society does not by any means limit its efforts to the laying out of open places, though, as Mr. Haywood is an architect, this side of its work is perhaps especially actively and expertly conducted. The Civic Society is, for instance, helping various citizens towards forming some organization which will perhaps tempt back Mr. Barry Jackson and his repertory theatre on a basis of a guaranteed audience, and it is again one of Mr.
Haywood's most cherished schemes to make Rotten Park Reservoir and the ground surrounding it into a Coney Island, where roundabouts, water-chutes, joy- wheels and other frivolous attractions can be enjoyed in the open air.
"Mean and unlovely," "A monument to carelessness and greed," says the pamphlet. Was that meant for Birmingham, or anyhow is it true of Birmingham, not as, please heaven, it may be, but as it actually at this moment is ? The answer, of course, depends a good deal on whether Birmingham is content to be judged by a purely local standard. The town will certainly strike a visitor as being better than many of the other industrial towns of the English North and Midlands, but not to say more than that is to rank it in a poorish class. Bir- mingham, first of all, will strike the visitor as the product of one particular age and spirit. It is a homogeneous town in a sense and entirely typical, in its faults and virtues, of mid-Victorian industrialism. Its principal buildings, public and private, are substantial, ugly and ill-disposed. Walk about in the streets at the town's centre—Corporation Street, New Street or C,olmore Row—and you will find perhaps two or three pains- taking copies of as many Venetian palazzos ; next them perhaps there will be big buildings with fancy gables obviously inspired by some piece of Belgian Gothic. Then we may be switched over to French Renaissance —to something in terra-cotta and turrets—and next will be a piece of Ruskin-inspired Gothic, with little square patches of tiles here and there let into its walls with a naturalistic design of ferns or water lily leaves. (The flora, to please Mr. Ruskin, had to be English.) All this well-built, solid and expensive.
The streets and squares are as jumbled as the styles, and at almost any point you are apt to come upon ware- houses and stations (in the good old style of go-as-you- please, built of bricks, slate and corrugated iron) which intrude upon the puzzled agglomeration of the expensive. However, a universal deposit of soot on brick and stone alike, and the rapid erosion of any stone ornaments there may be, and the smoke-veiled air, give a kind of unity to what would otherwise be a somewhat amazing collection. All these big blocks of buildings have, in a manner characteristic of their epoch, been set down quite casually, almost vaguely, on no particular principle. Their juxtaposition, therefore, materially hinders those functions which the business houses were built to fulfil, and the public buildings to promote, and Birmingham is faced with a very considerable traffic problem.
As for the outer parts of the town, there is some delightful Regency stucco work to be seen in the really charming 1880 suburb of Edgbaston (which reminds the visitor of Clifton or Clapham), but this is counter- balanced by deplorable districts like those which lie on either side of the continuation of Corporation Street and about the road which leads from the centre of the town towards Aston Hall. When shall we begin to ask our- selves what this sort of district is for ? It is to be found in most of our industrial towns. Belfast, for instance, has acres of it, it almost constitutes Wigan, and there are huge patches of it in London. The houses in such districts will be low, not more than two storeys high, and, though not more than sixty years old, will be getting rather dilapidated. In Birmingham the large, pale bricks are feeling the sulphur in the air and are crumbling. The roads, which have at least the merit of being wide, will be in very bad repair. Here and there the pave- ment curb is broken away, and it has never occurred to anyone to plant trees. At the intersection of the streets there will be little, half-hearted shops that sell somebody's flour, cake mixture, tea and egg substitute, or it may be disconsolate apples and potatoes, or perhaps tobacco, sweets and racing tips. One supposes that these streets were originally built as what Mr. Solness, the Master Builder, calls "Homes for happy human beings." But they are strange nurseries for the young citizens on whom we know, and the town knows, our future depends. These are nearly always districts far away from public libraries and baths. There has never been any attempt to concentrate the houses here and there, to build them up a little higher or what you will, to manage somehow to get some open spaces for children to play in. There are merely miles and miles of little-traversed, unrepaired road.
As for indoor amusements, Birmingham did not seem to me well off, but the evening I spent there was by no means hopeless. There was dancing—I do not know whether public or private—at the hotel where I was staying. I heard rumours, too, of a rather ill-supported Palais de Danse. The Repertory Theatre was, of course, shut, but there were two other theatres to choose from, one showing Lilac Time and the other a pantomime. I chose the pantomime at the Royal Theatre in New Street, and very amusing it was. I was impressed by a Birmingham audience's singing of the chorus of an admirable comic song to a solemn tune, "Do shrimps make good mothers ? Yes they do. . . ." On the evening after I left I saw that Mr. Eugene Goossens was to conduct a symphony concert. This seemed to be rightly regarded as a gala day in the town's enter- tainments. The standard of lettering for shops, public notices and so forth seemed to me low.
Such; then, did Birmingham appear to me, but if the Civic Society goes on flourishing, and Mr. Haywood does not die of overwork, there should be very visible changes in the town's aspect in a couple of years. A beginning has been made in the laying out of arterial roads, grass- bordered and with the trams tree-enshrouded. The open spaces are being treated as I have described, an effort is being made to tackle the question of town recreations, both frivolous and serious, and an effort is being made, though not apparently at present very vigorously, to do something about the smoke, which seemed to me distinctly worse than in London. The reader will, of course, have already noticed that all these activities mean money. The question of the finance and details of organization are too complicated to enter into here, though perhaps later, if Spectator readers are interested, it might be possible to give a short account of them. But briefly the chief source of revenue is a fund (apparently largely provided by the Cadbury family) called the Common Good Trust, and the money raised by what is, after all, no doubt an exceptionally rich municipality. The Birmingham Civic Society itself is like Pope's Man of Ross, also in the circumstance that it, too, possesses three hundred pounds a year.
Readers who desire to know more of the Society's work can buy its report (price is. 6d.) from the Secre- tary, 87 Bennet's Hill, Birmingham, or from Cornish Bros., Birmingham, they can get a copy of Mr. Haywood's quite admirable book (The Development of Birmingham, 6s. 6d.) of plans and designs for the improvement of his city. If this were the eighteenth century, "Haywood of Birmingham" would be a name as familiar as "Wood of Bath." I shall always be glad of the error which introduced me—and possibly many of our readers— to the too little known work of the Birmingham Civic
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