ABSTRACT
Introduction One locality, several ‘communities9 ‘South-west Birmingham’ is not a description that locals would readily use or recognize. It is the part o f the city most clearly dominated by white residents predominantly employed in skilled and unskilled manual occupations. The label applies to a cluster o f eight wards: Northfield, Selly Oak, Kings Norton, Brandwood, Weoley, Longbridge and (as a result o f boundary reorganization in 1983) the newly created wards of Bournville (inserted between Selly Oak and King’s Norton) and Bartley Green (carved out to the west o f Weoley). About 200,000 people live there.South-west Birmingham is the heartland of Birmingham’s white working class. Asian and Afro-Caribbean families are far less common there than in the ‘inner city’. Professional men and women generally prefer to settle in the suburbs of north Birmingham towards Sutton Coldfield and south-east Birmingham towards Solihull. Nevertheless, the locality is internally diverse. Within its boundaries are to be found private housing as well as council estates, ‘yuppified’ enclaves as well as clusters of deprived households. There are a number of distinct centres o f social activity - including shopping centres, schools, surgeries and public houses - which provide recognized points of reference for a large number of ‘communities’ and overlapping social networks.For example, the Pershore Road, one of the two main routes through the locality, passes through Selly Park, Stirchley and Cotter-idge in the north, skirting the Bournville chocolate factory and the residential properties of the Bournville Village Trust. The estate was established by George Cadbury in 1900, avowedly with the purpose 1 Management School, Aston University, Birmingham
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C H A N G IN G PR O SPEC TS of encouraging working men and women to lead decent and responsible family lives. It is still difficult to find a pub in the area. Ironically, Bournville is little more than a stone’s throw away from the blue cinema and massage parlour on the Bristol Road.The Pershore Road feeds into the Redditch Road which, in turn, passes the large post-war council house estate of Hawksley before crossing the city boundary going due south. Running roughly parallel to Pershore Road in the northern part o f the locality, the Bristol Road leads into the very busy shopping centre of Northfield. Two miles further down the same road, at the south-western extremity of the locality, is the Austin Rover car factory at Long-bridge.There is a high degree of continuity in the development of south-west Birmingham. From the beginning it offered scope for people who wanted to do well for themselves. The ancient parishes of Kings Norton and Northfield beyond Edgbaston Park and the city boundary constituted a kind of southern frontier for those seeking to enhance their fortunes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1840, the three canals cutting through these fields had been supplemented by the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway. Stations were opened on its route at Kings Norton (1849) and Northfield (1869). In 1876 the Birmingham and South-West Suburban Railway was opened, taking passengers down to Selly Oak, Bournville and beyond from the middle of town. Within three years the Cadbury brothers had opened their new factory. Just over a quarter o f a century later, a further railway station was opened three stops down the line from Bournville at Longbridge. In that same year, 1905, Herbert Austin opened his car works.In the period before World War I the chocolate and car factories both played an important part in attracting new residents into south-west Birmingham. Cadbury acquired a national reputation for cleanliness and care. Both the factory and the village (legally a quite separate concern) were bathed in a romantic glow in the reports of visiting journalists:
LOCALITIES Agents for Herbert Austin were drumming up labour in many areas outside Birmingham. By 1918 he had built an estate of 252 dwellings ‘on garden suburb lines’ complete with village hall, mission rooms and steam laundry (Church, 1979, p. 43). However, Austin did not attempt the ambitious programme of community betterment favoured by Cadbury. The car manufacturer concentrated upon attracting unskilled workers who would find his wages acceptable. His style was autocratic and individualistic. He admired Henry Ford and was much more overtly hostile to trade unions than were the management at Cadbury. Other firms joined the drift to south-west Birmingham. For example, land was purchased in Northfield by Morland and Impey (a firm which later became Kalamazoo Business Systems) in 1900 for £5500. Thirty-seven years later it was revalued at £47,000, one indication of the increasing popularity of the area (Smith, 1964, pp. 196-70).Residential growth complemented industrial expansion. Skilled engineering workers, anxious to escape the inner-city slums, came out to smart terraced houses with small gardens in Selly Oak, Bournville, Stirchley, Cotteridge and the streets close to the stations in Northfield and Kings Norton. In 1911 the city boundaries were expanded to include most of Kings Norton and Northfield Urban District. By 1918 substantial parts o f the wards of Selly Oak and Bournville, as currently defined, had been built up. Most of the eastern part of Northfield ward had been developed as had been the Bristol Road to the west of North-field village. Between the two World Wars there was rapid development closely related to the expansion of the car industry. The inhabitants of large new housing estates south-west of Kings Norton village ‘were drawn there largely by the opportunities for work provided by the Austin motor-car works at Longbridge’ (Elrington and Tillott, 1964, p. 21). Large estates also sprang up in Weoley Castle - ‘ambitiously planned. . . (with) numerous culs-de-sac, curving roads, and the provision of central community buildings’ (Tomlinson, 1964, p. 56) - and still further to the south-west beyond Northfield village in the direction of Longbridge.By the late 1930s a very large proportion of car workers were getting to work on wheels. A survey of methods of travel by employees at Longbridge works and another factory at Castle Bromwich (to the north-east of Birmingham) showed that in 1937 only ten per cent were walking to work. Many more were travelling by train (8.5 per cent), bus or coach (25 per cent), private car (14 per cent), motor cycle (2 per cent) and bicycle (13.5 per cent) (West Midland Group, 1948, p. 69). This suggests that the close association between factory and residential community cultivated at Bournville was less in evidence at Longbridge.
