Brum: a Gem

The Birmingham back-to-backs – Court 15, Inge Street to give them their proper name – are one of the more unusual properties of the National Trust. They are among the few survivors of a type of cheap housing once common in the industrial cities of Mercia and Northumbria. Spruced up by the Trust and furnished to show life in the 1840’s, 1870’s, 1930’s and 1970’s, they appear today as a cosy close just a short walk from the Bull Ring. Originally part of a larger court, when they were home to families with 10 children all sharing the rudimentary sanitation they would have been a much less attractive place. Imagination strains to grasp a reality still within living memory but which is fading fast. Conservation cannot simply convey the prettier parts of the past: critics who would have eradicated every last slum must learn to leave something behind to explain what all the fuss was about.

Normally, visiting is by guided tour but yesterday the back-to-backs were having an open day, themed on the Second World War, complete with Vera Lynn on the concealed CD player, bunting, and ration books, to use at the temporary canteen in the courtyard and the sweet shop on the corner. Court 15 was originally part of the city’s Jewish district and is now in the midst of Chinatown, surrounded by modern office blocks, covered car parks and numerous Chinese restaurants. The last tenant before restoration, a bespoke tailor who shut up shop in 2002, came from the Caribbean and his shop is preserved as he knew it.

Uphill lies Birmingham’s forum, the swirling paving of Victoria Square and Chamberlain Square, dominated by the Town Hall and the Council House, and round the side the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. The ensemble remains as exuberant an expression of civic pride as any and puts to shame the modern efforts that embrace and attempt pitifully to compete with it. Here can be seen some of the masterpieces of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including those of Birmingham boy Edward Burne-Jones. Today’s brotherhood and sisterhood of daubers, flickers and makers of unmade beds could usefully look and learn. One small painting in the collection shows a fairy-tale image of Sleep, trailing poppies through the sky, symbols of narcotic oblivion. It was painted in 1912, just before the conflict that turned the poppies of Flanders into a symbol of monumental stupidity. It's a fascinating reminder both of the role played by drugs in Victorian and Edwardian society and of how one generation's perceptions mould another's in ways neither expects to find. It was most likely the chaos of a much earlier war that gave rise to the Staffordshire Hoard, many pieces from which were on display. They are surprisingly, even disappointingly, tiny. Many are scraps of gold and garnet no more than an inch long. Most images show them magnified hugely to bring out the intricate detail. Clearly, the painstaking skill of the craftsmen must have been matched by piercingly good eyesight.

The Inscription Stone in the foyer, unveiled by Richard Chamberlain, Mayor, in 1881 describes the building’s purposes as ‘the Free Public Art Gallery and the Offices of the Corporation Gas Department’. Beneath is the motto, By the gains of Industry we promote Art. Taken together, those two lines encapsulate the public enterprise of late Victorian Birmingham. Gas-and-water socialism long pre-dated the Labour Party. It was the work of Liberal administrations dominated by business men, investing for the ratepayers in municipal monopolies that made money, money that was ploughed back into the development of services or used to lower charges to the barest minimum.

By 1890, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine was describing Birmingham as “the best governed city in the world”. By 1990 there was little left to show for all that effort. Last week, Labour’s Lord Adonis told the Lunar Society that Birmingham needs an elected mayor to drive forward the privatisation of the city’s schools, and no doubt other elements of the common wealth too. It was a Wolverhampton MP, Enoch Powell, who declared in 1964 that “In the end, the Labour Party could cease to represent labour. Stranger historic ironies have happened than that.” Like him or loathe him, the unintended accuracy of Powell’s predictive powers is unfailingly unnerving. Historians can look forward to much fun discovering who sold Labour out. And how much they got for it.

The rooms at BM&AG that tell the city’s story are closed for redevelopment but the story is also told at another attraction – Thinktank, the Birmingham science museum – on the opposite side of the city centre. Thinktank is part of Millennium Point, one of those nationally-funded regeneration schemes to mark the turn of the century, a clone in fact of At-Bristol. The business model is broadly the same – futuristic architecture, planetarium, IMAX cinema, hands-on science for kids – and though Birmingham’s has fared better than Bristol’s both are depressingly formulaic.

The ground floor of Thinktank re-houses the old Birmingham Museum of Science and Industry and if that’s all you’ve come to see it’s not much to justify the admission charge of £12.25 per adult. It’s not much to justify the huge public investment either. Large exhibits are crammed into tiny spaces that no zoo would tolerate, and which school parties must find infuriating. James Watt’s Smethwick Engine of 1779 – the oldest working steam engine in the world – needs to be in a replica engine house beside a canal for its function to be truly understood. Instead it stands in a frame of girders packed in by other devices and displays. The LMS locomotive City of Birmingham gazes forlornly out of its glass box towards the listed Curzon Street station building (below).

This, the ‘other end’ of the Euston Arch, is itself now marooned in a swathe of land awaiting redevelopment around it. Curzon Street is planned to be the terminus of High Speed Two, a £32 billion project propelling the rich to and from London, pointless at a time when re-opening old lines should take priority. On arrival in Birmingham, passengers will have a half-mile walk to the chronically congested New Street station for their onward journeys, but £400 million has already been committed to a cosmetic redevelopment of New Street that will provide no additional capacity for trains. Far-sighted proposals for a 'Birmingham Grand Central' at Curzon Street have been spiked by city councillors, minding the interests of that same class of penny-pinching, myopic shopkeepers who once stood in Joseph Chamberlain's way. For Adonis, Birmingham is a city living in the past. Perhaps it is. But just now that seems a better place to look for inspiration than among the pygmy politicians of the present day.