Eastside Masterplan vs. Fred Grove

Warwick Bar, Birmingham, Dec 31st 2005.

You can spend time in an area and never sniff the real stories.  D'log alerts me to a Birmingham canalside story that I didn't know about yesterday, but which has been bubbling along for four years, and has only just reached a sensible resolution.

The Eastside Masterplan is the 'aerial' view of this story.  Says the Birmingham Council:

Respecting the city's heritage
The Eastside concept is breathing new life into the area through the development of the cultural quarter, reflecting the city's many and diverse communities, buildings and natural heritage.

Combined with a commitment to conserve and improve the quality of the local environment, Eastside will encompass well-designed, attractive buildings, spaces, historic waterways and railway viaducts, with sustainability issues at the heart of the project.

Closer to the ground is an old man called Fred Grove.  He's been living in a 'lockkeeper cottage' for 40  years, and for four of those he's been under notice to quit, to make way for the Eastside plan.   

Today BBC Birmingham says he's won a reprieve, and will be allowed to stay in his home after all.

The story says that the Eastside plan would have preserved the cottage but - bizarrely - would have evicted him.  Not sure why. Perhaps it would have made an ideal 'heritage centre', complete with animated mannequins delivering speeches reminding people how their forebears used to live alongside the canals in the days before heritage centres.

Or perhaps the Masterplan was a glorious Christopher Wren-esque vision for the Eastside that would have made Fred Grove look an obstreporous short-sighted stick-in-the-mud.  Certainly there are big things planned for Warwick Bar that are going to steamroller the locality (main picture above, and below-right). 

In the aftermath of the Great Fire of London I suspect there were quite a few Fred Groves owning the ashes of mediaeval London, and looking back I think it's a wonderful thing that Christopher Wren had to work around them.  Wren's vision to sweep away the mediaeval street plan was thwarted by their stubborness, and London is left with the characterful higgledy-piggledy streets that Dickens knew so well.  (I read somewhere that Wren's plan was later used to lay out one of the colonial American cities, perhaps in Pennsylvania or Virginia - anyone know about this?)

Brummie online newspaper The Stirrer ("News that matters, campaigns that count for Birmingham, the Black Country and beyond") has a video interview with Fred Grove after he learned he'd won his fight.   I can't find a profile or history of the story as a whole, nor any pictures of the cottage or interviews with the developers, so I'd rank it as biased.  It's just a sob story, cheering on the old underdog.

Which is a shame, because it would be nice to read a local, Stirrer-type story about the whole masterplan, not just one valiant gentleman.  I wandered the area a year ago when Granny spent New Year's Eve there, and took many photos of the area (including the yellow 'major planning application' notice pictured here).  The canal around Warwick Bar has huge potential and any development obviously threatens to disturb many locals (and possibly a few bats). 

So I can't find anything online about the real - greater - story, which is about the whole redevelopment, including interviews with the developers about why they felt it was necessary to evict Fred Grove.  It's a shame no one's started a blog for him, and it would be great to read a blot from Birmingham's equivalent of Sir Christopher Wren for the Eastside Masterplan.

Amendment:  I see now that the The Stirrer's Blogspot blog will give you several posts on Mr Grove if you tickle it thus. And I can see that behind The Stirrer's stories is respectable former BBC TV journalist Adrian Goldberg, so it's well-written and -filmed, and he knows how to tug the heartstrings.  But I still can't find a dispassionate account that looks at the 'aerial' view of this story.

Hey, talking of aerial views, thank heavens for Live Search's maps.  What a magnificent resource!  It's allowed me to finish off this far-too-long post by finding this excellent bird's-eye view of Belmont Row, thanks to finally tracking down the compulsory purchase order on the neighbourhood.  And yes, the cottage in my picture above is the one  at the heart of the story (and of the picture below)
   
Thanks to D'Log ("blogging non-stop since 2000") for the story alert.

Comments

[dp]

Local or not, your perspective is relevant. You, as a boater, would have an opinion on the treatment of waterways.

I recall your comment about Warwick Bar being a place whose dereliction we may come to value. That view is not often stated with such clarity, and represents an appreciation of landscape character.

Warwick Bar - and the greater Eastside - are susceptible to the kind of redevelopment that would wipe out the interesting bits of dereliction and gentle decay, replacing them with more Millennium Points, Aston Science Parks, and overly-sanitised Woodsman pubs. Is that what the boating community wants to see? Your perspective is relevant and perhaps representative.

In that vein, you way want to have a look at what's in store for the former Curzon goodsyard as Birmingham's newest outdoor leisure space. The winning City Park design scheme is not clear about what it will do on the ground - it could be a mix of blessing and curse.

[Andrew Denny]

Thanks, DP, a great comment!

It does need a lot of people on it, that's true. But I feel that the more local people who write about it in open blogs (and link to other local bloggers), the better.

Granny is only a passer-by, not a local. I simply observe interesting things that I think deserve more attention, and try to raise their profile. But I'm happy to watch and revisit stories. And I'll now keep a watch on the phrase "eastside masterplan".

[dp]

You are right in wanting a good overall story. But to get that story you would need investigators who were both good at ferreting information and who had the time to track all of the pertinent sources. One could say that the plan is too big to be detailed in any one place or by any one person.

I have tried to do bits of it on and off for several years, and can say that while I have come across people who are very familiar with the Eastside story, they are generally too busy to write about it, and nobody - Goldberg included - has found the time to interview a number of those people and write a cohesive story.

If I were going to do it I would start with people in community, policy and academic sectors who have an interest in and concern about the way Eastside develops. This includes local architects, academic staff at UB and UCE, staff at regional policy institutes and in groups representing cultural and heritage interests. There would also be mileage in seeking the views of residents (Such as Fred Grove) and business people in the area. Contrary to what one might suppose, this latter group cannot be expected to line up uniformly behind the Masterplan, since some of them are under pressure to relocate. Even some of the big players might have an objection or two. (You may have heard about the chemical processing facility scandal last year that put the entire masterplan in jeopardy.)

The Eastside Team is headed by an approachable fellow, and one might make some inroads with regard to getting the official side of the story. But one would have extraordinary difficulty getting more than a superficial account of the scheme and its processes.

On this basis I think the general feeling is that the scheme needs as many eyes on it as possible; that a lot of community-minded people need to be following various bits of the story and coming together to keep in touch. There are already people like Joe Holyoake, Libby Porter, the Birmingham Civic Trust and Midlands Architecture and the Design Environment (MADE), each of whom is doing something important in terms of keeping an eye on things.

But it also needs you, me, the Goldbergs, D'logs, Brum Blogs and so forth. Not because we write about such things, but because the development is supposed to be in our interest, for our benefit. If we value Fred Grove's tenure, if we believe that the house is more important with him in it, and that it is his life there that gives the house significance, then we need to be making that clear to everyone who acts on our behalf.