ABSTRACT
If cities are memory, then in the mid-1950s the city centres served as the lens that brought that memory into focus. For those ports and industrial cities that had suffered most in the Blitz, the townscape remained pockmarked by ‘great holes in the ground where buildings used to be’.3 The new identity of the bomb sites as temporary nature reserves, populated by stray cats and colonised by a carpet of wild flowers, did little to remove their status as open wounds. Rundown street frontages in less fashionable areas, blackened stonework and peeling paint might have been ubiquitous enough not to cause comment, but they served as a daily reminder of continuing dilapidation. Industrial dereliction ate its way almost into the centres of many formerly thriving manufacturing towns. Visitors to Birmingham for the 1950 Annual Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science received a regional survey on arrival that represented the towns of the Black County as haplessly accommodating themselves to the dereliction of the area’s ‘clinkery’ mining and metal-smelting past.4 Those purchasing the ‘About Britain’ guides produced for the 1951 Festival of Britain might have heeded W.G. Hoskins’ sardonic advice not to avoid the six towns of the Potteries (‘seven miles of concentrated 5
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 522 6 7 8 9 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 302 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 1 2 3 4
acreage of . . waste’ that ‘desperately needs making over anew’.6
