I don't think the houses were so bad, but I was born in one and my perception is mainly that of a child. Also, we had a 'through' house rather than a back to back. That is, at the front there was an old shop room, then a front room, then a living room and then a kitchen. There was no hot water, of course and we had our own back yard. We were considered posh. Most of the friends I grew up with lived in back-to-backs. Behind our house there was a court with fourteen back to backs.
Our house was clean and sound in the fifties. In the forties, I know that my mom had to complain to the council as a piece of ceiling fell near my head on my bed one night. Once we had a chimney fire due to faulty brickwork at the side of the fireplace. The house was draughty and had gas and electricity; gas for light and for cooking. Of course, there was and outside lav. Electricity was put in before the war but the houses down the back didn’t get it until the late forties, early fifties.
Some friends lived in what seemed to me even then, squalor, but that wasn’t necessarily to do with the housing. People were poor, low paid or out of work, and living in overcrowded conditions. The back to backs generally had one bedroom and an attic room. Parents would use the bedroom and the children, the attic. As the children became older the bedroom may be subdivided with a sheet to separate boys from girls. Often, once they were at work, older children would move out to rent somewhere of there own. For the boys, national service would play a part.
Sometime in the fifties the council carried out a big renovation scheme. Roofs were repaired or replaced wooden floors were replace masonry repaired and walls replastered. All the houses were given a new lease of life. No hot water or bathrooms though. Then in the sixties, slum clearance and rebuilding started and people were moved into the high-rise warrens.
Before this happened, when my father died in the early sixties, we moved to a relatively new council house in West Heath. I had a taste of the new Birmingham before it hit Aston and Lozells.
Looking back I am relieved that I had my childhood before the redevelopment and before we moves. It was a rich area of covered entries to run down and hide in, courtyards to play in, walls to climb over with back gardens to run across, waste ground and recreation grounds for adventures and racing your bikes, Sunday schools to get sent home from, the pictures to smoke and meet girls, parks for fishing, libraries for reading, the swimming baths for splashing and diving, lampposts you could swing on and streets where you could play football and cricket.