Leslie Ginsburg and the replanning of bombed Birmingham
When Leslie Ginsburg first came to Birmingham, the city’s reconstruction after its wartime bomb damage had hardly begun. The city had received as many tons of bombs as had Merseyside; the two were equal second as worst-bombed places after London. Unlike many other – bombed and unbombed – cities, a deliberate decision has been taken by Herbert Manzoni CBE (later Sir Herbert, the City Surveyor and Engineer) not to produce a major comprehensive plan and certainly not to employ eminent and expensive consultants to do so.
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
