Terry Grimley: No.50 route shows Moseley Road’s decline
If you travel on the upper deck of a number 50 bus from Moseley Village to Bradford Street, as I have been doing lately, you will get a strong impression of an England poised on the brink of catastrophic environmental decline.
Or perhaps it’s just Birmingham? Either way, it is a striking slice of inner city in which fading civic glory rubs shoulders with creeping shabbiness.
This stretch of a mile or so contains a remarkable number of distinguished architectural survivals, starting with the huge former Moseley tram depot on the corner of Trafalgar Road and ending with the Friends’ Institute, recently the subject of a rescue campaign after it was revealed that the council’s Hall Green Constituency Committee was seeking to offload it.
This imposing building was given to the city by the Cadbury family and is home to 44 small arts and community organisations.
In between come such imposing relics of past civic glory as the Moseley and Balsall Heath Institute, Moseley Road Baths and (directly opposite) the former Moseley Road Art School.
The problems of Moseley Road Baths, said to be of national importance as an unusually complete survival of its Edwardian type, have been exhaustively documented, yet remain unresolved.
The Art School, now a Muslim community centre, is in better condition internally than its mouldering facade would suggest.
But the facade continues to moulder, even though there was talk some years ago of a bid to the Heritage Lottery.
Lesser buildings which nevertheless add quality to the road include the New Inns pub (currently looking for a tenant) , the fine Queen Anne-style former fire station and a long row of early Victorian villas which would be much in demand as offices if they were in Edgbaston but are now largely empty and boarded up. I fear for their future.
Gaps between surviving Victorian and Edwardian buildings have been thoughtlessly plugged with tin sheds and various other eyesores since the 1960s.
The fact that Kwik-Fit was allowed to put down a shack which is not even parallel with the road is final proof that urban “planning”, at least in this city, is a myth.
Opposite the boarded-up Victorian villas the new Joseph Chamberlain Sixth Form College has recently been completed.
This is a solid but surprisingly old-fashioned building which offers a bold curved frontage to the traffic whizzing by on the Middleway but only a boring box to the Moseley Road.
At least it’s added a few new trees.
In short, Moseley Road is a bit of a mess. Despite the fact that a remarkable number of distinguished buildings survive – just – along its length, it seems unloved and unregarded, and it certainly isn’t getting better. My point is this.
Whose responsibility is it to do something about it, to recognise that a street is more than the sum of its parts and that some co-ordinated action is necessary to uplift its environmental quality?
I know that local government is strapped for cash, but if it’s not the council’s job, whose is it?
Back in the 1970s the council lifted whole inner-city residential areas back from the brink with its innovative “enveloping” schemes, in which the external fabric of Victorian housing was renewed whole streets at a time.
It’s true that there was plentiful European money at that time which is not available now, but is the city exploiting all possible sources of external funding, such as the Heritage Lottery, which recognises the value of historic streetscapes as well as individual buildings?
Meanwhile, just imagine what a boarded-up and probably vandalised Friends’ Institute would add to the malaise of Moseley Road, possibly tipping the balance into irretrievable decline.
But that doesn’t appear on the council’s balance sheet, which is preoccupied with the building’s annual £39,000 loss (which seems puzzlingly small when there are 44 tenants potentially to share the burden).
It’s the Lib Dems, who have a majority on the Hall Green committee, who have failed to distinguish themselves in the matter of the Friends’ Institute, but this is not a party-political issue.
Before power changed hands in 2004 I used to wonder whether Labour had some grudge against Balsall Heath.
It’s all very well for Mike Whitby to tell the Conservative Party Conference that he and his friends have got litter and graffiti sorted, but those of us who travel on the number 50 are reminded on a daily basis of his civic impotence.
