| Post-war, today, and tomorrow
The Warwick Canal, part of the Grand Union after 1929, had been
improved by bank shoring and the widening of the Yardley Road
tunnel, just in time for its wartime commercial use: since then
the wharves and loading bays of Hay Hall Estate are derelict,
and only pleasure craft use the waterway. The railways have struggled
too, with dingy stations, and the great expanse at Tyseley is
largely occupied by the Railway Museum. The North Warwickshire
Line has been under sentence of closure. Perhaps rail travel locally
will have a renaissance, now that the improved roads made between
the Wars have finally become choked with traffic. Motor buses
replaced trolleys on Coventry Road in the late 1950s. Bus competition
has introduced some ancient and strange looking vehicles onto
existing and new, speculative routes. The car and the lorry continue
to usurp the functions of bus and train despite the inadequacy
of the roads.
Historic buildings are ever fewer. Hay Hall, Pinfold House,
Rushall Lane Chapel, and the Arden Road cottages are all we have
left. Acocks Green House, Broom Hall, Tyseley Grange, Stockfield
Hall, Field Gate Farm, cottages on the corner of Flint Green Road
and Muscott's Tannery have been lost. Even modern buildings are
not safe: the Rialto and Robin Hood cinemas have been replaced
by supermarkets, though one cannot mourn their loss as buildings.
The Dolphin was replaced by a supermarket in 1991, and the Fox
Hollies went the same say a decade later, with only the fine Fox
and Hollies emblem remaining in the wall of the new building.
Crosby Hall School (the former Convent School) was replaced by
a supermarket ten years before the Dolphin. Hall Green Little
Theatre is a gain, if not architecturally .The third Swan ('Europe's
largest') has gone. Yardley's extractive industry has ended. The
Burbury pit is level ground, filled with industrial waste much
more quickly than it was excavated, and the Waterloo brickworks
pit was abandoned. The greatest excavation of recent years locally
was that which put Tyseley Brook completely underground, in what
is called the Hall Green Valley Sewer.
Shopping areas have flourished generally, although Greet is
dying. Acocks Green has developed notably from Station Road to
Oxford Road. However, the Co-op supermarket retreated from its
early 1960s row to the Green, and then abandoned that site, finally
re-appearing in 2004 across the island at Shirley Road in much
smaller premises. Part of the former Co-op premises in the 1960s
block are now a pub, given the historic local name of the 'Spread
Eagle', and containing local history photographs and information.
Despite a service road and a short stretch of dual carrageway,
parking is a great problem, as on Sparkhill, at Springfield, and
to a lesser extent at Hall Green. Warwick Road at the Green is
still narrow. Housing development has not been spectacular, except
at Fox Hollies, where towers rise in the former hall grounds.
New estates, both municipal and private, have generally been small,
being infillers of those conveniently-left spaces, and cramped
to an extent that would have horrified the Rural District Councillors
of 1909. As available sites become fewer, there is more demolition
of Victorian mansions, and their replacement by terraces and slabs
of flats. Two system-built areas of housing, at Stockfield and
Gospel Lane, have had to be demolished and replaced. Conservative
legislation encouraged municipal tenants to buy their homes, and
as many as a half of the houses on some estates are now privately
owned, with some householders struggling to keep their houses
maintained.
These must surely be typical features of the future hereabout,
and one wonders how long the open spaces will be safe. Reduced
mobility due to the cost of petrol and the sheer misery of driving
in the City for more and more of the day might bring them back
into greater public use - just as it may give a new lease of life
to the railways and even the canal. Coventry Road has certainly
become the Eastern Expressway, if not a dangerous race-track,
but flow of traffic along Stratford Road is not being achieved
by widening but by designation as a so-called 'Red Route', where
no stopping is allowed. Meanwhile the only relief on the Warwick
Road in Acocks Green is an attempt to improve the staggered junction
at Fox Hollies and Stockfield Roads. There is a short widened
stretch at Greet, however, where traffic takes advantage of the
ability to travel faster!
For a summary of land use in 1973,
go to this map.
|
