Term Paper on "British Heritage Conservation Principle"

Term Paper 14 pages (4121 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

British Heritage Conservation Principle

An Analysis of the Birmingham Jewellery Quarter Conservation Efforts and What Can Be Done to Improve the Process

One of Birmingham's oldest manufacturing communities is its jewellers in the city's historic Jewellery Quarter. Today, efforts are underway to preserve the unique quality and character of the Birmingham Jewellery Quarter, but some observers suggest that these initiatives may do more harm than good by destroyed the region's unique qualities and flavor. To determine what can be done to improve the process across the board, this paper provides a review and discussion of the relevant issues, followed by a summary of the research and salient recommendations in the conclusion.

Review and Discussion

Background and Overview. Today, Birmingham is the second largest city of the United Kingdom and is a metropolitan borough in the West Midlands metropolitan county; the city is situated near the geographic centre of England, at the crossing points of the national railway and motorway systems. According to the encyclopedic entry for the municipality, "Birmingham is the largest city of the West Midlands conurbation -- one of England's principal industrial and commercial areas -- for which it acts as an administrative, recreational, and cultural centre. The city lies approximately 110 miles (177 km) northwest of London" (Birmingham, 2005 p. 2). The historic core of the City of Birmingham, together with Edgbaston and northern neighbourhoods (such as Sutton Coldfield, Erdington, and Sheldon), is situated in the historic county of Warwickshire (Birmingham, 2005).

The first market charter for Birmingham was granted in a hundred years after the Battle of Hastings, but it took until the 14th century before the city emerged as a settlement of import (Birmingham, 2005). The region is characterized by a paucity of river transportation, thereby cutting it off from important maritime contacts during the Middle Ages; this lack of transportation resources at the time constrained the region's development from a small manufacturing town to a large city until the late 18th century. At that time, Birmingham emerged as the leading nucleus of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. According to the historians, "Birmingham's population grew from 15,000 in the late 17th century to 70,000 a century later; its metal and gun-making trades expanded, fine jewelry was made alongside cheaper lines, and its brass buttons and trinkets served a world market" (Birmingham, 2005 p. 3).

Beginning in the early 19th century, things started turning Birmingham's way. For example, following the Reform Act of 1832, Birmingham was able to elect its own members to Parliament (however, the city was not incorporated until 1838); at that time, rail links were established to Liverpool and London and in 1873 the rich local industrialist Joseph Chamberlain was elected the city's mayor. During Chamberlain 3-year tenure, a number of important reforms were implemented, including broad-based slum and city-centre redevelopment initiatives (Birmingham, 2005).

Over the coming years, Birmingham would prove to be a pioneer among British communities in its urban planning efforts; for example, in 1911, Birmingham launched town-planning scheme, one-way-traffic experiments in 1933, and even municipal airports at early as 1939. While industrial activity and heavy bombing left the city drained by the end of World War II, Birmingham eventually began razing slums and bombed-out areas in the central districts and replaced them with tall blocks of apartments and office buildings; furthermore, a new inner ring road system, a rebuilt central train station, and new shopping and commercial complexes, and a network of canals in the northwestern and southern parts of the city, were all part of the city's postwar rebuilding in an effort to transform itself from a blighted district to a thriving community. Today, Birmingham continues to be the key centre of Britain's light and medium industry and is still sometimes described as "the city of 1,001 different trades" (Birmingham, 2005). Certainly, Birmingham's economic success over the years has been related to such diversity in its industrial base; however, in recent years, this diversity has been primarily concentrated on the metal and engineering trades and today, the largest single industry in terms of employment is the production of motor vehicles, while bicycles and motorcycles are also manufactured in the area, the bicycle trade has somewhat declined (Birmingham, 2005). In addition, the city remains a leading centres for the machine tool industry; during the 1970s and 1980s, though the city's service sector grew in size to effectively compete with the manufacturing sector (Birmingham, 2005).

The main focus of Birmingham continues to be Victoria Square, with the classical Town Hall (1834), the Renaissance-style Council House (1874-81), and the City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, which is noted for its Pre-Raphaelite paintings and its English watercolours. St. Philip's Cathedral (1715), in its green churchyard, forms another focus, while the Georgian area around St. Paul's Church (1779) is a unique site as well. Other centres have formed around St. Chad's Cathedral (Roman Catholic) (designed by A.W.N. Pugin) (1841), and the beautiful Birmingham Post and Mail building (1964) (Birmingham, 2005).

Today, Birmingham is the cultural centre for a wide region of the country. For example, the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, opened in 1913, has acquired a national reputation; in addition, the Midlands Arts Centre for Young People, built in the 1960s, houses theatres, a concert hall, an art gallery, and workshops and studios. Likewise, the Birmingham and Midland Institute hosts educational and artistic facilities and the city's symphony orchestra plays throughout the Midlands; the city's Central Public Library is also one of the largest municipal libraries in the UK. The city also enjoys the presence of the University of Birmingham (1900) and Aston University (1966) as the primary institutions of higher education; private institutions include the Selly Oak group of colleges and King Edward's School (founded 1552). The metropolitan area of Birmingham's population is approximately 2,628,200 (Birmingham, 2005).

According to Plant (2003), the Midlands is a vast, flat stretch of urban sprawl with a high-rise heartbeat in a long skyline. It is home to millions of people, and millions more pass through it every day. "For all its size and centrality, though, few people outside Birmingham know the city well. With none of the glamour of the capital, or even the romance of the industrial north, it is often seen as no more than an interchange, a spaghetti junction of tangled highways, subways and flyovers, its character subsumed by its traffic flows" (Plant, 2003 p. 30). In reality, though, Birmingham has never been an easy city to define: even in its medieval past, it had none of the outstanding features of the other nascent cities of the day - no fine castle, no ancient seat of learning, no great sights. Its rivers were not big enough to navigate, leaving it as far away from the sea as it is possible, in England, to be (Plant, 2003). As a result, Plant says Birmingham had to "reinvent itself": "With no means of gaining access to the ports, and so the world, it built an extensive network of canals. By the late 18th century, its ability to improvise and innovate had turned the city into the 'great toyshop of Europe,' in the words of Edmund Burke" (Plant, 2003 p. 30).

By the turn of the 19th century, the city was producing small metal goods of every sort, including buckles and buttons, toothpicks, snuffboxes, sugar tongs, tweezers, corkscrews, bells, coins, hairgrips, inkstands, watch chains, paper clips: toys and tools for workers and machines (Plant, 2003 p. 30). The vast majority this type work, though, was highly specialised, and was frequently required to be accomplished by individuals or small associations of artisans who were too loosely organized to be called either companies or firms. At the time, the ideological differences between these groups caused many observers to suggest that the city's lack of economic coherence and the duplicated, fragmented, small-scale and short-term nature of its work would spell its doom; however, in the final analysis, it turned out that these same constraints were the key to the city's long-term success. According to Plant, "Many of its best inventions involved small but crucial modifications of existing techniques and materials: the steel pen nibs that revolutionised writing in the 19th century; the electroplating of fancy goods, which made it possible to spread precious metals thinly enough for all to afford" (Plant, 2003 p. 30).

Today, Birmingham remains a city in which goods, activities and people are continued to be reshuffled in new ways, but industrialization remains a key to its success; in fact, more new patents issue from the city than from the rest of the country combined (Plant, 2003). According to Plant:

This is a city of a thousand cultures, with a wealth of peoples, values, tastes and styles drawn from every corner of the world. The city handles its scale and diversity so well because it has never known life any other way. Even its most long-standing families haven't been rooted here for long: every newcomer is the latest in a line of immigrants reaching back to the city's… READ MORE

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