My connection with the school was as a student of the Birmingham School of Architecture which at that time operated in Margaret Street in the wonderful building still used by Birmingham City University. Once a week during the early part of the course which I attended from 1955 to 1960 we migrated to Broad Street where Leslie Ginsburg would talk to us about what we now call urban design, talks which I found so stimulating. I don’t recall any examinations or tests from his course but I know that it became easier for me to develop ideas in broader brush strokes of architectural design, to consider that architects had a wider responsibility to the community in their approach.

Of course, at that time town planning as a legislative practice was only 10 years old and still considered to be an art practiced by designers (architects, and, amazingly, civic engineers) and the concepts of sociology or economics for example were not part of the mix. As an illustration of this perusal of the Ginsburg Collection at the school indicates very clearly the professional design attitudes then prevalent. Equally, Professor Larkham can talk fluently about the architectural background to and influences on the town planning in the 50’s and 60’s and I recall with pleasures conversations to this effect.

As an architectural student all this suited me down to the ground and even now I enjoy working in the school part time with Professor Chapman in modules to do with urban design. I graduated in 1960 so my visits to Broad Street must have been between 1957 and 1960, probably in 1959 (second year).

After some hectic years as a salaried architect working generally on town centre development projects in the UK I decided to undertake a course to gain a Diploma in Town Planning offered by the school. This was a three year twice weekly evening school course which was held in Gosta Green.

At this time the school was in what is now the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design (BIAD) at Gosta Green. The actual accommodation for the school, taken up in the mid 1960’s, consisted of two major rooms and some smaller ones which were actually above the stage in what would have been the scenery fly tower had the stage been in use. The stage was in a theatre area which was never used as it housed the library. The rooms had bare block walls, a fully exposed riveted steel framework, and a noisy wooden floor… I think the diploma course was the only one available – I’m not sure.

There is a nice bit of folklore here concerning Professor Peter Dovell, a wonderfully outgoing and enthusiastic head of school. It became apparent that in view of increasing student numbers the two rooms were not the best way to use space and he asked the local authority if they could be knocked into one. He waited for ages for a response, got none, and so in frustration, during a holiday period, took this fairly large wall down single handedly. After the break we trooped in and were amazed to see what we thought was work in progress. In fact Peter was not a plumber or electrician so stopped work when the wall was down, leaving us to listen to our lecturers through a maze of unsupported radiators, pipes, wiring and conduits, hanging sockets and light switches. As I recall it stayed like this for some months!

Incidentally, the course was heavily staffed by visiting lecturers from practice in West Midlands Planning Offices – sadly I can’t recall their names, but I do recall some permanent lecturers, particularly Geoff Crook, Alan Edgar, Peter himself, Kevin Thomas, (Dick, and a very gentlemanly landscape architect whose name escapes for the moment).

I completed the Diploma course with only one major scare, the dreaded subject of sociology – you know Family and Kinship in Bethnal Green etc. I failed the final year exam twice and was told if I failed once more I would have to leave the course! Happily I spoke with the acting Head of School at that time, Judith Knowles, and she diagnosed that I was in trouble because I was answering the exam questions as an Architect, and NOT as a Planner. Wow. It was the first time I realised that one had to adopt different approaches according to one’s professional background. But it did the trick and at last I passed. Then, amazingly, I was asked if I would apply for the post of a lecturer – and was appointed.

Around 1968/9 the school moved out of the ‘attic’ and settled into a prefabricated single storey building on a site sitting between the canal junction and Aston Road, still very close to the Gosta Green Building. As the Aston Science Park grew the site of the ‘huts’ as they were known was cleared and remains a landscaped bank to the canal.

Although not built for the school it provided ideal accommodation and with an ever increasing number of students and staff (actually up to six) it became home to the school in a way absent before or after as it moved into bigger and bigger shared accommodation. We had our own caretaker, Derek, who arrived from Tamworth every day in his ‘Dell Boy’ Reliant three wheeler and looked after us very well. Mind he was a regular attender at the student parties we were able to host, without the authorities knowing. Probably.

Another bit of home spun folklore centred on a senior lecturer in landscape architecture whose office window was smashed whereupon he scrounged some hardboard and nailed it into place. For a year he politely asked for a new pane of glass, but to no avail. So he requisitioned from the Director of the Polytechnic a new piece of hardboard, using all the appropriate forms, competitive quotations in triplicate ( made up of course), and it worked – within 24 hours he had his new glass.

For most of us moving away from our own little home with its town centre convenience to the remote site at Perry Barr was a wrench. Certainly the professional relationship with students keen to learn was very strong, and there grew a positive interaction which I am not sure survived the move.

So, I think that with a starting date with the school, as a student, in 1967/8, with two stints of teaching, one for 20 years, one for eight years, and still teaching part time for Jean Badman and David Chapman, I am the person with the longest connection with the school (and the most retirements) you will come across! And I have enjoyed all of it. Congratulations to all involved.

Our archive has some photos of early application forms from the 1950s.

With the death of Walter Stranz at the end of August the TCPA lost one of its most respected, devoted and likeable supporters. He came to England from Nazi Germany in 1939 and took a wartime degree before training as a teacher. He first became involved in the Association’s affairs when he was elected to serve on its council in 1972, when he was a Labour councillor on Redditch Borough Council (where he later became Chairman of its Planning Committee and Mayor).

As secretary of the Midlands New Towns Society, a Board Member of Redditch New Town Development Corporation and, in the 1970s, a councillor on the Hereford and Worcester County Council, he provided a unique combination of experience in the two principal levels of local government, the new towns, and the voluntary sector, not to mention holding a teaching post in a local secondary school.

With this experience he brought a thoughtful blend of intelligence, wisdom, commitment and quiet energy. For many years he served on the then Executive Management Committee, and on various working groups, notably the Poplars Working Group (predecessor of the Lightmoor Working Group) and the Neighbourhood Initiatives Foundation. He was elected Chairman of the Association’s Council in 1989, a post he held until 1992. Sadly, towards the end of his Chairmanship he contracted Parkinson’s disease, a condition from which he suffered increasingly for the rest of his life.

He wrote extensively for Town & Country Planning, and although deeply involved in planning and local government matters in the Midlands, he wrote perceptively on matters ranging more widely, from the impact of the Channel Tunnel on Northern England, to how water privatisation would weaken the increasingly frail powers of local authorities to direct developments to specific sites in the interest of good planning.

Walter was Chairman at a time when the TCPA was in the early stages of working out its ideas on sustainable development and at the same time setting itself an immensely far-reaching agenda – on the one hand showing through its local projects how the bottom-up approach to decision-making could be made to work in practice, and on the other developing new principles and a new philosophy about planning a sustainable world. It was also a time when the Association was struggling to keep itself afloat financially and operate under a revised constitution. It was a reflection of his inherent good nature and patience as well as his wisdom and political experience that he was able to guide the TCPA at such a challenging period.

Walter was enormously respected and admired locally in his adopted town of Redditch and was made an Honorary Freeman of the town in 1994. A permanent memorial to him is under consideration by the local authority.

David Hall, Vice President and former Director TCPA, October 2005

Other articles:

• Obituary – The Guardian
• Obituary – Worcester News
• In Memory of a Town Freeman – This is Worcestershire
• The Naming of Walter Stranz Square

In fact, many ideas about rebuilding the city had been circulating before the Second World War – in some cases even during the First! These included the need for a ring road, and the urgent need for large-scale slum clearance.

Clearance areas were quickly identified, as five zones which quickly became known as the “New Towns”. The inner ring road was equally quickly designed, its route linking some of the worst-damaged bomb sites. A private Act of 1946 gave permission for the ring road, but not the sanction to borrow money for its construction, nor to obtain it as grants from central government, nor for the structural steel and other building materials for the construction of the road or the necessary replacement buildings – these were still rationed until 1954-5.

So the plans existed, but progress was painfully slow. Ministry of Transport approval was needed for the 75% grant necessary, but this was withheld until 1956 when a new Minister reconsidered his predecessor’s priorities, and was also threatened with repeated embarrassment at national conferences by the city’s Chairman of its Public Works Committee, Frank Price. The planning application for the first section was approved on 31 May 1956. Not long after, Ginsburg arrived to set up the new School of Planning.

Construction began in 1957 and the first section, the future Smallbrook Queensway, was opened in 1960. The Council had purchased land on either side of the route, and this would allow – fairly narrow – commercial buildings, to bring in some rental revenue. The sites were put out to tender, and one local development company bid for several sites and, using a local architect, James A. Roberts, developed the whole of the south side of the road.

Ginsburg photographed this part of the ring road under construction – including the first phase, when the elevated office building over Hurst Street stood alone as a steel skeleton. His photographs were used in a hard-hitting critique of the city’s reconstruction and the ring road design, published in high-profile professional journals.

Ginsburg was an early critic of the ring road design, which he saw as “niggardly”, and of the Council for only seeking to purchase the route itself and the land immediately adjoining it. “Never at any time does there appear to have been an attempt to acquire or negotiate for sufficient land to develop in depth”. In total, “unhappily this looks like being the greatest traffic and town design tragedy yet to afflict an English city”. Comprehensive planning was necessary (Ginsburg, 1959; Birmingham Post, 1959). In fact the prevailing ethos when the road was designed and the Act approved was that only the minimum land should be compulsorily acquired; this, and central government’s tight financial restrictions, mean that Ginsburg’s ideal wider planning ideas were never practicable at that time. He also felt that offices and shops should not be lining a major traffic through route, and this view was shared by the Ministry – so the design of the later stages (Suffolk Street Queensway onwards) are very different. Very similar criticisms of the disappointing nature of the unfinished ring road were also levelled by Tetlow and Goss (in their 1965 book; Evening Mail, 8/4/1965) (Tetlow was also associated with the School).

His criticisms of Smallbrook Queensway led to criticism of the Bull Ring proposals. The first designs had been by Roberts for the same developer; but he had lost out to Laings. Laings’ own architect simply revised the scheme. Ginsburg – with his architectural background, and supported by an Editorial in the same issue of the Architects’ Journal, 4/2/1960) – was critical of the circumstance whereby Roberts had done much of the conceptual work and negotiation, and his ideas were essentially taken over by a new developer and architect: for the approved scheme

“owes much to another project put forward earlier by Property and General Investment Ltd, which had all but been approved by the Public Works Committee, when negotiations broke down on financial grounds. This scheme had been prepared by … James A. Roberts, who did all the initial donkey work including protracted negotiations with British Railways, Midland Red Omnibus Co. and the various other interests involved, and who paved the way for the type of project now approved. Indeed, his own scheme obviously played a large part in influencing the final design which has been approved, and the greater simplicity of his massing suggests that if he had been allowed to take it a further stage, he would have probably put forward as good a scheme as is now before us.”

Needless to say, these strongly-worded criticisms of the City’s flagship redevelopment, voiced by the newly-appointed Head of the newly-constituted School of Planning, one who had little familiarity with the city, were not well received in the city’s hierarchy.

View some of Ginsburg’s Photos of the Birmingham Reconstruction

He had an early interest in town planning, as is shown by his winning the national competition organised by the Liverpool Civic Society and the Liverpool Daily Post for ideas for the replanning of bombed Liverpool. A press cutting from the Eighth Army News in Ginsburg’s own papers records his success, and the award of the 50 guinea first prize. He had by then risen to the rank of Corporal in No. 1 HQ Mechanical Equipment Unit. On being asked by the Army newspaper whether his Army work helped his town-planning ideas, he responded “the only planning work we do here concerns bulldozers and excavators and how to move muck”.

The results of the competition were published in a booklet, Merseyside of the Future, edited by James R. Spencer in 1944. The judges were eminent experts, led by Lord Leverhulme (who had paid for the first University Professorship in Town Planning, at Liverpool; and for the publishing of the Town Planning Review, still going today); Percy Thomas, RIBA President; Lionel Budden, Professor of Architecture at Liverpool; Elizabeth Denby the housing consultant, and Mrs Charles Booth.

Ginsburg’s winning entry focused on the need for a new Merseyside County Council, “a regional body with full executive powers, capable of administrating the region as a whole”. In the city itself, as did many reconstruction plans, he proposed a new ring road, with four carriageways and tram lines, tree-lined and with grass verges. On a smaller scale he favoured terraced houses – but with soundproof walls and integral workrooms and washrooms; better selection of building materials that did not stain; consideration to the pollution impact of industry; the location of public facilities for health and recreation; and, conveniently located next to new residential areas, pubs “at a much higher standard than is common at present. They should serve coffee and refreshments as well as the usual drinks – and monopolist brewers should not be allowed to get hold of them”.

After the war Ginsburg completed his education, then became a lecturer at the University of Manchester. On the founding of a School of Planning in Birmingham, he was appointed as its first Head. He drew together a teaching team of experienced planners, including Tetlow, who had been one of the Ministry’s Regional Planning Officers during the war. An advisory committee was set up to guide the School’s development, consisting of civic representatives and members of the relevant local professions – including Sir Herbert Manzoni, the long-serving City Surveyor and Engineer.

The new School was advertised widely in the professional press, and attracted viable but small cohorts to its first sessions, held in rooms above a car showroom on Broad Street. The University archive contains copies of the first recruitment brochure, for the 1957 courses. Ginsburg seized every opportunity to get good press coverage for the School and its activities, including consultancy and research, overseas visitors, and student field visits and projects. However, by the mid 1960s there were questions about the resourcing of the School and its administrative home. This led to Ginsburg resigning the Headship to take up a post at the Architectural Association, London.

View more School Nostalgia in the 1950s Photos

Politically, it was the decade of Thatcher – anti planning, and public investment, anti state and local government control.

The School of Planning operated, therefore, within a hostile national political environment and the decade started badly with a cull of town planning courses throughout the country. For a year or so the School was under threat of closure along with many other Planning Schools. This threat was successfully fought off, though many other schools did close. The saving of the Birmingham School was very much down to the leadership of David Leyland who was Head of School from 1978 to 1983.

I joined the School in 1979 and within a year, what was a strong and forward looking school could easily have been closed down. David Leyland and his team gained the support of all the local planning authorities and consultants in the region and a powerful lobbying campaign was undertaken. This bore fruit with the School not only continuing, but gaining new investment from the Birmingham Polytechnic and Birmingham City Council. This began a period of growth in both student numbers and new innovative courses. By 1983 when David became Dean of the new Faculty of the Built Environment the School was on the way forward.

David Leyland was replaced for one year in 1983 by Walter Stranz, with the intention of David returning to take over again. In those distant days the Deanship was a one year role, with each Head of School within the Faculty doing the job for 12 months. This was before the days when the Dean was the all powerful figure he is today. The School of Planning until the late 1980’s was the decision making body with the Faculty playing a very much subordinate, coordinating role. Far be it from me to comment on whether the structure that developed from then on was an improvement or not – oh, go on then, it was in my humble opinion far better. But as an old codger, I would say that wouldn’t I.

Walter Stranz was, I remember, amazed to be given the job – he had no ambition for it and only accepted reluctantly. He was a lovely gentleman – respected by everyone, staff and students alike for his knowledge, his compassion and his humour. He was for many years a senior local politician, being Labour Party Leader for both Worcestershire County Council and Redditch District Council. He was a widely published academic with a particular interest in the New Towns movement. Not least, whilst Head of School he started the Diploma (later MA) in Environmental Management, a pioneering and exciting course that continued for almost 20 years.

David Leyland did not return as Head of School – he moved on to bigger things as the Head of a major college in Southampton. Walter retired in 1984 and was replaced by Peter Fidler who remained as Head of School until 1986. Peter was a larger than life figure physically, intellectually and in personality.

Under Peter (and his successor, Janice Morphet) the School rapidly developed a national, even international reputation. New staff came in, all young and full of ideas. For me the period from the mid 80’s to the early 90’s was the most exciting period in my 26 years as a teacher in the School. It was no surprise to any of us who worked with Peter that he soon became President of the Royal Town Planning Institute and eventually Pro Vice Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University and then Vice Chancellor of Sunderland University. Their gain was very clearly our loss.

During this period of the mid 80’s student numbers grew with very strong undergraduate and postgraduate courses and a whole range of other courses. Ironically this was still a time when the government looked suspiciously on planning, their support was lukewarm.

What was needed was strong leadership – Peter provided this and so did his successor Janice Morphet. Janice was a surprise appointment to many of us. In those days the staff had a vote on the candidates and I clearly remember Janice received very few, if any votes. She quickly overcame our suspicions and negativity by her dynamism, her commitment to the School, and her amazing ability to promote the School locally and nationally at every opportunity.

Under both Peter and Janice the School was literally buzzing with every week bringing new initiatives, fresh ideas, and a growing complement of new lecturers some of whom are still teaching at UCE Birmingham – Colin Wood, Dick Pratt and David Chapman to name three.

So, the 1980’s ended with the School thriving and growing, a massive change from the start of the decade. Much of this was due to the work of the various Heads of School, but it was also due to a superb group of teaching staff who together gain the School a well deserved national reputation.

We were given virtually no information or data – we were expected to collect this ourselves. The surveys were carried out in a ‘group’ of about 30 full and part timers. We were rather too ambitious, conducting a massive traffic survey which we had to analyse laboriously by hand, as our computing facilities were very basic in those days. We also carried out a 10% house to house survey of people’s needs and views of the area – which we attempted to analyse using the college’s computer. All the data had to be inputted on punched cards – you can image the effort required.

Eventually we drew up our proposals on a very large 1:1250 scale Ordnance Survey map. As it was a ‘live’ project, we held an exhibition and public meeting in a church hall in Villa Road. The Evening Mail sent a reporter and photographer along to record the event.

These large-scale ‘live’ projects are mostly history these days – the nearest equivalent on the current course is perhaps “Strategy into Action”, where student groups prepare a Community Strategy for a much smaller area. Unlike us, they get to choose their own area, and also unlike us they aren’t expected to do any primary data gathering, other than a visual survey. No interviews, no traffic counts – everything obtained from published sources.

The other main difference between then and now is that in 1970 planning was much more physical: although we covered issues such as tenure, car ownership and employment, our proposals were essentially land-use based. Today’s projects are much broader in scope, and confining your submission to a set of land-use proposals would hardly get you a pass. Social and economic issues are equally important. These broader aspects were only just beginning to be recognised back in my student days.