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Brindley Place & Ladywood coursework

A

Archie Harris

New Member
I’m a first year geography student undertaking research comparing and contrasting Brindley Place and Ladywood over the last 30 years, the topics I am specifically focusing on are :
  • Is there a significant difference in house prices and quality between Brindley Place and Ladywood?

  • Has there been a change in the individual demographic of Brindley Place and Ladywood over the past thirty years?

  • Has there been an obvious shift in tenure of the chosen locations over the course of the last thirty years?

Would any members be prepared to help me with a short questionnaire/interview and/or point me in the direction of any literature or people who could help me?
Any help you give me would be greatly appreciated and I would of course give you full credit in any information received in my final report.

Thank you Archie
 
Archie Harris said:
I’m a first year geography student undertaking research comparing and contrasting Brindley Place and Ladywood over the last 30 years, the topics I am specifically focusing on are :

  • Is there a significant difference in house prices and quality between Brindley Place and Ladywood?

  • Has there been a change in the individual demographic of Brindley Place and Ladywood over the past thirty years?

  • Has there been an obvious shift in tenure of the chosen locations over the course of the last thirty years?

Would any members be prepared to help me with a short questionnaire/interview and/or point me in the direction of any literature or people who could help me?
Any help you give me would be greatly appreciated and I would of course give you full credit in any information received in my final report.

Thank you Archie
Click to expand...

Hi Archie Harris this sounds like a fascinating project, Ladywood has certainly been a place of social change over the years and would be well worth researching. I do hope you will share the findings of your research with the members of this forum.

Good luck with it.
 
As Mike suggests in Post 3, I would also think that Brindley Place would be in Ladywood. If you take Sheepcote Street in 1973 the address is in Ladywood.

However looking at the modern map, and noting that Brindley Place development was started in 1993, it is now part of the Westside District. So it seems a bit puzzling to compare such a large District as Ladywood with the small area of Brindley Place?
 
It seems that Brindley Place is referred to as Westside and Ladywood when advertised. The postcode is Ladywood and it is in the Ladywood ward constituency. If you look in Wikipedia it is referred to a Brindleyplace and the word Ladywood does not appear anywhere on the Page.

In 1945 the MP for Ladywood said in the Commons that there was a street in Ladywood that had one lavatory for 36 people. Over 30 years later but a world away from that described in Brindley The place in the advert below...

“10,000 people on average visit Brindleyplace every day. The security team work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to ensure that every single person who visits the estate is kept safe. The security team plays a large and vital part in achieving the safe and friendly environment, to which the Brindleyplace management team are committed.”

Contact Us for Information on Brindleyplace - Brindleyplace, Birmingham

Contact Us for Information on Brindleyplace, speak to our estate team, marketing, security, car park and access media packs with information on Brindleyplace
www.brindleyplace.com www.brindleyplace.com
 
Brindley place seems to be around what was Oozells st north. and Oozell St. This, immediately before the Place was formed was largely industry. You have to go back to pre WW2 to find significant areas of housing, unlike many parts of Ladywood, which had large areas of ousing , probably much as described in the 1945 reference
 
Unless the boundaries of Ladywood have changed over the last 50 years or so then what is now called Brindley Place would be well within those boundaries. As shown in red on this 1950's map (possibly earlier).

phil01.jpg
 
Archie, would it be right to assume that the area under comparison and contrast is the area encompassed by the present Brindley place, (still considered to be a part of Ladywood), and that of the remaining area of present Ladywood?

It already looks as if there is an effort to shove the "Ladywood" connection under the carpet?
 
Phil said:
Unless the boundaries of Ladywood have changed over the last 50 years or so then what is now called Brindley Place would be well within those boundaries. As shown in red on this 1950's map (possibly earlier).

View attachment 135371
Click to expand...
This map has brought back memories of when Victor Yates was MP for Ladywood after the war and my father was the conservative party agent for Ladywood, before being stabbed in the back by the party he worked for (plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose). The map is almost identical to the one he worked from for his boundaries and of course on one hand there was the area around Broad Street with the canal (then active), the businesses large & small, not a great many actual inhabitants and, (I will be careful how I word this because a great many of the back to backs were like palaces inside, that mother polished and scrubbed and ruled over with a rod of iron), the depression, squalor and unemployment of the area beyond the canal at Brindley Place known to most as the slums. I knew Victor Yates as a man who cared about those people, he and my father, although on opposite sides of the political spectrum got on well and Dad could refer any problems to Mr Yates and he would respond and deal with the matter. The irony of it all was that bordering all this were the affluent areas with its grand houses etc that was Rotton Park and Edgbaston and Broad Street with its expensive shops he says trying to remember the name of the furniture shop with the funny windows. Strange to think that years later I would tie up for an overnight on the towpath of the canal.

Bob
 
Bob Davis said:
This map has brought back memories of when Victor Yates was MP for Ladywood after the war and my father was the conservative party agent for Ladywood, before being stabbed in the back by the party he worked for (plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose). The map is almost identical to the one he worked from for his boundaries and of course on one hand there was the area around Broad Street with the canal (then active), the businesses large & small, not a great many actual inhabitants and, (I will be careful how I word this because a great many of the back to backs were like palaces inside, that mother polished and scrubbed and ruled over with a rod of iron), the depression, squalor and unemployment of the area beyond the canal at Brindley Place known to most as the slums. I knew Victor Yates as a man who cared about those people, he and my father, although on opposite sides of the political spectrum got on well and Dad could refer any problems to Mr Yates and he would respond and deal with the matter. The irony of it all was that bordering all this were the affluent areas with its grand houses etc that was Rotton Park and Edgbaston and Broad Street with its expensive shops he says trying to remember the name of the furniture shop with the funny windows. Strange to think that years later I would tie up for an overnight on the towpath of the canal.

Bob
Click to expand...
The MP quoted in Post 6 was indeed Victor Yates.
 
It strikes me that Archie would be interested in the great photos provided by Guilbert of the Area in the 1980s?

Convention Centre & Broad Street - historic photos

In the early 1980s Birmingham council began to clear the area around Broad Street to build the International Convention Centre (ICC), the National Indoor Arena (NIA), and Brindley Place, as well as many apartments. I went up there with my trusty camera (pre-digital of course) to try and capture...
birminghamhistory.co.uk birminghamhistory.co.uk
 
en.wikipedia.org

Lee Bank - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
Read Deterioration & Regeneration at the end of the article. Lee Bank was a part of Ladywood bordering Bristol St and the middleway. In a lot of ways it is symptomatic of the regeneration of the residential area. Because this is usually considered a high crime area the assumption is that it's the fault of low-grade housing, poverty etc. Ladywood is a high-crime area because it's at the edge of the city centre in the late night entertainment section. When the Mailbox was built with high-price apartments, they objected to the B16 (Ladywood) postcode because Ladywood was known for it's high crime rate. That was the beginning of the conversion of most of the housing in the area. I don't know if this has really affected the crime rate but there's a lot more money in the area.
 
Morturn said:
Hi Archie Harris this sounds like a fascinating project, Ladywood has certainly been a place of social change over the years and would be well worth researching. I do hope you will share the findings of your research with the members of this forum.

Good luck with it.
Click to expand...
Thanks everyone. I have now finished my project and have used some of the quotes and photos supplied by various people - I have acknowledged sources in the report. I will check with my teacher whether I am able to share this with you yet as it has to be marked and moderated by the exam board, so it may be that I can't share it until after this point, but I will share it when I am able to. Thanks again
 
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