Birmingham: A Metropolis in the Midlands

Over the centuries, economic prosperity, especially in the textile industry, would grow a burgeoning town into a booming economic center. Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, the major industries in Birmingham shifted from textiles to manufactured metal goods.2McKenna, Birmingham, 18. Birmingham “distinguished itself as a centre of higher-value highly skilled trades such as jewelry, gun-making, and button-making,” while the rest of the Midlands economies focused on mineral extraction and metal manufacture.3Ward, City-State and Nation, 5. According to local historian Roger Ward, “large factories were less a marked feature of the Birmingham industrial landscape and fewer still could match the scale of the larger Lancashire mills.” Rather, Birmingham was made up of a “middling sort” of “skilled and relatively well-paid craftsmen” who were well equipped for upward social mobility.4Ward, City-State and Nation, 8. During the seventeenth century, as the population of the city rapidly grew, the geography of the city was reshaped along class lines. The wealthy began to move out of the “built-up” center of town into nearly built houses with large gardens and courtyards on the outskirts of city. The poor filled housing in the city center, where houses were converted into cheap tenements.5McKenna, Birmingham, 23. By the end of the eighteenth century, Birmingham’s landholders, such as the wealthy Sir Thomas Gooch, began to divide their land in the city center, selling it to developers to partition into smaller dwellings.6McKenna, Birmingham, 41. McKenna notes that Gooch’s land at the terminus of the Birmingham canal was particularly valuable. The canal from the Black Country greatly reduced the cost of importing coal, which allowed Birmingham’s metalworking industry to continue to grow in the late eighteenth century.

Into the nineteenth century, Birmingham had become a city of “many trades” and was not as dependent on industrialization to support its economic prosperity. Distinct from the rest of the surrounding coal-rich “Black Country,” which primarily focused on ironworking for economic prosperity, in Birmingham skilled artisans and small workshops were common. Brass goods, for example, were a major Birmingham export that might be compared to Manchester’s cotton.7Briggs, History of Birmingham, 29–30. As a result, Briggs argues that “walls of social privilege” were not as tall or firm in the city as compared to other large towns.8Briggs, History of Birmingham, 5 Ward similarly argues that “there were fewer men of great wealth, more of a ‘middling sort’ and a larger stratum of skilled and relatively well-paid craftsmen” living in Victorian Birmingham. Thus, prospects for “upward social mobility were greater” in Birmingham than in Manchester or Liverpool.9Ward, City-State and Nation, 8.

Politically, Birmingham was more directly influenced by London (which was only 120 miles away) than the two Lancashire cities. Beginning in the 1840s, eleven trains ran from London to Birmingham daily – a trip that took less than five hours.10Ward, City-State and Nation, 5–6. The railway connection between London and Birmingham not only tied the two cities together politically, but indirectly influenced the development of municipal public health after an 1846 Act of Parliament ordered that a new railway line be built directly into the heart of Birmingham.11McKenna, Birmingham, 63. However, typical Victorian liberal governance left most of the power to control the urban environment in the hands of local authorities. To make way for the new railway station, an 1852 Birmingham Improvement Act empowered local authorities to demolish buildings in the city center. This work also created an opportunity to improve the health and sanitation in the city center by removing substandard housing.12Briggs, History of Birmingham, 29. In-home work and converted dwellings used for workspaces were often among the “most cramped and unhealthy kind” and court housing was nearly as common in Birmingham as it was in the other two cities.13Briggs, History of Birmingham, 6; Stewart, Courts and Alleys, 13. By the 1860s and continuing into the 1870s, the downtown neighborhoods of Birmingham were transformed as redevelopment occurred around the new railway station. Old, unsanitary buildings were torn down and built anew. Local gentlemen either individually or through syndicates took ownership of Birmingham’s redevelopment, buying up real estate in the city center and greatly increasing the costs for tradesmen to live above their workshops.14Briggs, History of Birmingham, 11–13. This rebuilding boom peaked twice: between 1875 and 1877, and again between 1890 and 1900.15Briggs, History of Birmingham, 25–26.

Despite its fewer court houses that trapped refuse in cellars or attics, waste management was a serious public health concern in Birmingham, especially as the population grew and complacency about the problem rose in the latter half of the nineteenth century.16Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons, 112. As a landlocked city with only two small streams passing through, drainage was particularly problematic in Birmingham, which necessitated creative and innovative solutions. Birmingham could not simply flush sewage out to sea or along a major river as Liverpool or Manchester could, respectively. Although Birmingham built its first water sedimentation plant in the 1850s and began experimenting with lime precipitation to reduce waste in the 1870s, sewage volume remained unbearable through much of the latter half of the nineteenth century, and the costs were considerable. Between 1851 and 1859, the town council invested £147,000 into building sewers, but as late as 1871 the sewage problem remained.17Gehrke, “A Radical Endeavor,” 31–32. An 1871 Sewage Inquiry Committee reported that 3,884 premises, housing 20,000 people, were using 7,065 flushing water closets, while another 325,000 people, residing in 70,000 houses, were using 19,551 midden privies or ash pits, which were open to the air and situated beneath or against houses, with very few draining into sewers. These unsanitary toilets were fouling the environment around them as well as municipal underground water supplies.18Borough of Birmingham, Report of the Sewage Inquiry Committee, xi.

Despite these problems, Birmingham was comparatively slower than Liverpool (1847) and Manchester (1867) to appoint a Medical Officer of Health.19Gehrke, “A Radical Endeavor,” 27. Alfred Hill was appointed as the city’s first Medical Officer of Health in 1872, working only part time at first. Birmingham also had fewer sanitary inspectors (one for every 30,000 residents, compared to one for every 8,000 in Manchester).20Briggs, History of Birmingham, 76. However, after a Liberal electoral landslide in 1873, Birmingham’s new radical Liberal mayor, Joseph Chamberlain, who was deeply committed to public works and promoting the public health, renegotiated Hill’s appointment, making him full time with a salary of £1,000. Fifty percent of his salary was paid by the city, the other half by the Local Government Board.21Mooney, Intrusive Interventions, 55. A vigorous expansion of public health quickly followed, including sanitary reforms, redevelopment of working-class housing, and a restructuring of the city’s municipal gas and water supplies.22Gehrke, “A Radical Endeavor,” 23. Within two years of Hill’s appointment, a Health Committee was formed to oversee the removal of sewage and other waste, to oversee the inspection of foodstuffs, and to improve city housing.23Briggs, Victorian Cities, 229.

While urban redevelopment in Birmingham had been ad hoc beforehand, in 1875 Chamberlain began his “Great Improvement Scheme,” empowered by the national Artisans’ Dwellings Act of 1875, which allowed local councils to buy, clear, and rebuild slum dwellings. Chamberlain believed that the city center had become so crowded that it harmed both economic growth and the public health. His vision for housing reform broke up the congestion. While it was not solely designed with public health in mind, Chamberlain envisioned housing that would allow more sunlight and air into houses, improving their environments by accident, if not primary intent.24Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons, 126–27. Hill was tasked with mapping the most crowded areas of the city, those with houses without back doors or in courts with only one entry, to be targeted for redevelopment. The city selected ninety-three acres, over Conservative resistance. Rebuilding began in 1878, with an initial investment of over £1,000,000 for new property development, though the project operated at a deficit to the city until 1892.25Briggs, Victorian Cities, 229–32.

Following the new “civic gospel” of municipal reform that Chamberlain preached, innovations in waste removal also emerged. Economically minded municipal administrators conceived of a plan to collect and sell excrement for agricultural fertilizer: a technologically designed “sewage farming.” The goal was to repurpose waste for agricultural fertilizer. But the project failed miserably. The surrounding farmland outside the city that used waste-based fertilizer was improperly drained, and so the sewage simply turned it into a “sodden morass.”26Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons, 108–9. By the 1890s, however, the city had made significant research into the uses of natural aerobic processes of bacterial decomposition to activate the natural purification of soil and water supplies. By the interwar years, Birmingham had fully embraced the process of natural irrigation with bacterial beds.27Luckin, “Pollution in the City,” 216–17.