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RING ROAD: BIRMINGHAM AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE MOTOR CITY IDEAL IN 1970s BRITAIN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2017

SIMON GUNN
SIMON GUNN*
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
*
Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester, Leicester, le1 7rh[email protected]
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Abstract

Reconstructing Britain's cities to accommodate the ‘motor revolution’ was an integral part of urban renewal in the post-war decades. This article shows how opposition to urban motorways had a pivotal role in the retreat from urban modernism in the 1970s. It takes as its case-study Birmingham, Britain's premier motor city, headquarters of the motor industry, and with heavy investment in roads, including the Inner Ring, Britain's first urban motorway completed in 1971. The article traces the collapse of the motor city ideal in Birmingham sparked by controversy over car pollution at Spaghetti Junction, the growth of roads protest, and the implication of the Inner Ring in municipal corruption. In so doing, it identifies the intersection of environmental, political, and economic factors that lay behind the volte-face in urban policy and compares Birmingham with other cities which witnessed similar revolts. It argues that the 1970s in Britain saw the end of a specific engineering vision of the post-war city, centred on the car and the ‘citizen-driver’.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 61 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 227 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

Research for this article was made possible by a standard grant from the Leverhulme Trust, AAM1011029 ‘Motor Cities: Automobility and the Urban Environment in Nagoya and Birmingham 1955–1973’, held with Dr Susan Townsend, University of Nottingham. I am very grateful to Dr Matthew Parker for sharing his research on Birmingham. Thanks also to Richard Butler, Krista Cowman, Guy Ortolano, Otto Saumarez Smith, and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for helpful comments.

References

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6 Sutcliffe and Smith, History of Birmingham, p. 398.

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14 My thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers for this apt phrase.

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17 Buchanan, Traffic in towns, p. 32 and conclusion. See also Gunn, ‘The Buchanan report, environment and the problem of traffic’.

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19 This paragraph as a whole owes much to the discussion in Matthew Parker, ‘Making the city mobile: the place of the car in the planning of Birmingham, c. 1955–1973’ (Ph.D., Leicester, 2015), ch. 6. The Ph.D. mainly deals, however, with the planning of the motor city in the 1950s and 1960s rather than the subsequent collapse in the 1970s.

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22 The new DoE replaced the three Ministries of Housing and Local Government, Transport, and Public Building and Works.

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27 ‘Noise protest by Ringway residents’, Birmingham Mercury, 3 Dec. 1972.

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32 ‘Spaghetti Junction’, ATV Today, 14 Mar. 1974, MACE.

33 Birmingham Mail, 30 Mar. 1973.

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37 Financial Times, 6 Jan. 1979.

38 Lead pollution in Birmingham Steering Committee, flyer produced by Birmingham Environmental Health Department, Nov. 1979, TNA, HLG 156/749.

39 See ‘Public transport in the Birmingham area’, 12 Oct. 1966, TNA, MT 97/536, p. 1, on the strong ‘car-consciousness’ among Birmingham's residents.

40 ‘Rapid transit system forecast for 1980s’, Times, 8 June 1972.

41 Hall, Peter, ‘London's motorways’, in his Great planning disasters (Berkeley, CA, 1980), pp. 56–86Google Scholar; Davis, John, ‘“Simple solutions to complex problems”: the Greater London Council and the Greater London Development Plan, 1965–1973’, in Harris, Jose, ed., Civil society in British history: ideas, identities, institutions (Oxford, 2003), pp. 249–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Davis argues that the Ringways literally drove the Greater London Council plan, especially the inner London Ringway 1 or Motorway Box.

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43 ATV regional television news between 1968 and 1982, as well as other footage on roads in Birmingham, can be found at MACE.

44 Birmingham Post, 24 May 1973.

45 Birmingham Post, 3 May 1977; Birmingham Post, 5 June 1973.

46 Birmingham Post, 24 May 1973, 3 July 1974, 30 Mar. 1973.

47 Birmingham Mail, 25 May 1977.

48 Birmingham Mercury, 3 Dec. 1972; Birmingham Mail, 14 June 1974 and 26 Nov. 1974.

49 ‘Do it yourself crossing’, Birmingham Mail, 26 June 1969. Krista Cowman's work on playstreets highlights the role of women in contesting traffic on city streets from at least the 1930s onwards. I am grateful to her for allowing me to see her forthcoming article on this topic.

50 Birmingham Post, 14 Feb. 1974.

51 Birmingham Mail, 13 Apr. 1970.

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56 Records of Sir Herbert Manzoni, newspaper cuttings 1959, LBA, BCC, MS1543/1; ‘Papers to the people and cities conference, 11 December 1963, London’, TNA, MT 122/77, Part 1.

57 Birmingham Mail, 30 Sept. 1970. 10 per cent of people asked were undecided.

58 Birmingham Mail, 26 Mar. 1971.

59 ‘Buchanan on Birmingham’, Birmingham Post, 12 Oct. 1971.

60 Birmingham Mercury, 11 Feb. 1973.

61 Ibid.; Birmingham Mail, 13 Oct. 1970. The Middle Ring Road was only finally completed in 1998.

62 Birmingham Mail, 18 Feb. and 6 Oct. 1974.

63 ‘Jam tomorrow’, Birmingham Post, 3 Jan. 1974.

64 Birmingham Mail, 7 Apr. 1977.

65 ‘City's ringroad falling apart, says engineer’, Sunday Times, 29 May 1977; Bernard I. Clark, ‘General report on structural state of Birmingham Queensway’, commissioned by the Sunday Times, 27 May 1977. The papers on which this section is based are to be found in TNA, AT 63/33 Local Transportation, Birmingham Inner Ring Road.

66 Birmingham Mail, 31 May 1977; Birmingham Post, 2 June 1977.

67 Guardian, 4 June 1977.

68 Birmingham Mail, 1 June and 17 June 1977; Times, 31 May 1977.

69 Report of Department of the Environment, 11 Nov. 1977, TNA, AT 63/33, Local Transportation, Birmingham Inner Ring Road.

70 Birmingham Post, 21 and 24 June 1977.

71 Birmingham Post, 28 June 1977.

72 A confidential minute indicates that Rodgers had been advised by Councillor Bevan on West Midlands City Council that ‘although there was no need to hold an inquiry, in view of the public political interest in the matter he was inclined to support one’. Rodgers construed this to suggest the metropolitan authority was not in favour of a public inquiry. Minute from S. V. Whitcomb to Hughes, 20 Mar. 1978, TNA, AT 63/33 Local Transportation.

73 Sunday Times, 24 July 1977; see also ‘Borg too far’, Private Eye [n.d.], TNA, AT 63/33 Local Transportation.

74 Times, 5 Apr. 1978; ‘The moral flaws behind Birmingham's modern face’, Times, 18 May 1978; Guardian, 26 Sept. 1978. This last article indicates that the directors had their sentences cut. See also Doig, Alan, Corruption and misconduct in contemporary British politics (Harmondsworth, 1984), pp. 182–5Google Scholar.

75 Times, 20 and 25 Mar. 1978; Birmingham Post, 20 May 1978.

76 Letter from West Midlands City Council to Birmingham District Council, 12 July 1978, and internal memos, DoE, 26 July 1978, TNA, AT 63/33 Local Transportation. Between 1974 and 1986, Birmingham was part of the West Midlands Metropolitan County; the city authority kept the title ‘City Council’, though technically Birmingham was now one of seven metropolitan districts.

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83 The term ‘inner city’ was borrowed from America and used extensively by Peter Walker, Conservative minister for the environment between 1970 and 1974. Walker commissioned a number of ‘inner areas’ studies including Birmingham's Small Heath. For a detailed discussion, see Saumarez Smith, ‘The inner city crisis’; Clapson, Mark, Anglo-American crossroads: urban planning and research in Britain, 1940–2010 (London, 2013), pp. 124–37Google Scholar.

84 This is the gist of John Davis's argument on Ringways, Davis, ‘“Simple solutions to complex problems”’.

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88 While the growth in numbers of private cars in Britain slowed significantly between 1973 and 1978, the overall trend was steadily upward, from 19 million cars in 1970 to 31 million in 2007. For a profile, see Leibling, David, Car ownership in Great Britain (London, 2008), pp. 1–7Google Scholar.

89 As is implied, this was far from the case everywhere. In West Germany and Japan, loss of faith in the ‘automobile-friendly city’ did not occur until a decade later; in China and much of Asia, the motor city is only now coming into its own. For insights, see Schmucki, Barbara, ‘Cities as traffic machines: urban transport planning in West and East Germany’, in Divall, Colin and Bond, Winston, eds., Suburbanizing the masses: public transport and urban development in historical perspective (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 149–70Google Scholar; Townsend, Susan, ‘The “miracle” of car ownership in Japan's “era of high growth”, 1955–1973’, Business History, 55 (2013), pp. 498–523CrossRefGoogle Scholar.