This category contains 4 posts

Birmingham Housing

From the rapid expansion of Birmingham during the early part of the Industrial Revolution to relatively recent times Brummies have often got the soiled end of the stick when it comes to housing. From inner city back to back housing to the prefabricated municipal housing schemes of the 1960s Birmingham has entertained every fad in home building, the folly of many such fads only now being truly realised and addressed, albeit by some schemes that will probably equally be reflected upon with some disdain in years to come! In this section we recall the houses and housing estates where Brummies have lived over the years.

Woodview Estate – Edgbaston

The City of Birmingham has a great time-honoured tradition of replacing substandard housing with soon-to-become substandard housing – see the results of  inner-City slum clearance around Aston, Newtown and Nechells for prime examples – and where once we had great swathes of the City cleansed of their private hovels to be replaced by the wonders of municipal […]


Wychall Farm Estate – Kings Norton

The Wychall Farm development seen above is phase II of a £40m regeneration project replacing 500 council properties – a mixture of high-rise blocks (demolished in phase I) and Smiths houses, as seen here. The houses, some of which have had to be repurchased by the Council as they had been bought by the residents, […]


Ley Hill Estate – Northfield

The Lay Hill Regeneration Scheme, begun in 2000, is another prime example of the gradual erosion of Council housing in favour of Housing Associations. Whilst, in the long-term, this saves the cost of repairs for the Council it also, in this case at any rate, removes 750 sub-standard constructed houses built by Wimpey in the […]


Egghill Estate – Northfield

Recently described as ‘resembling Beruit’, the Egghill Estate near Frankley Beeches, Northfield, was built during the 1950s/1960s and encompassed many types of poor quality housing from the tower blocks which once lined Lower Beeches Road, to the prefab, concrete housing elsewhere on the estate: demolition and a fresh start was the only economically viable option. […]