Nechells Baths, Birmingham

Nechells, on the north-east fringe of central Birmingham, was a gritty place of canals, railway lines and gas-works and power stations, for which the terracotta public buildings of the “Civic Gospel” were much-needed amenities.  Bloomsbury Library had been built in 1892 with a police- and fire-station attached, but no swimming baths.

Baths were vital in working-class districts, not so much as leisure centres but as an indispensable aid to personal hygiene.  Slipper baths were a desirable alternative to the tin bath in front of the fire.

Though the site was purchased in 1903, construction of Arthur Harrison’s design began only in 1908, and the swimming bath and male and female private baths were opened in 1910. 

For many years it provided winter assembly facilities when the bath was boarded over. 

It closed in 1996 and became badly vandalised. 

It was handed over to the Birmingham Foundation (now the Birmingham & Black Country Community Foundation) and with the financial support of Advantage West Midlands, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the European Regional Development Fund it was restored as a multi-purpose community facility providing a crèche and nursery facilities, an internet café, office accommodation for not-for-profit community organisations, a youth club, community bingo and a thriving dance group.

The restoration used recycled demolition materials to provide a new entrance portico with an extension faced in natural copper and a rotunda of masonry, brick and glass.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

Moseley Road Library & Baths, Balsall Heath, Birmingham

The magnificent brick and terracotta public buildings of central Birmingham stand as a proud symbol of the city’s civilised provision for all its citizens at the end of the nineteenth century

The promise of baths and a library was part of the agreement by which Balsall Heath, formerly part of Warwickshire, was brought within the city of Birmingham.

The Moseley Road Library with its clock tower was designed by Jethro Anstice Cossins & Barry Peacock, with an elaborate terracotta municipal coat of arms by Benjamin Creswick, and opened in 1895.  This is the same team who had built the Bloomsbury Library, Nechells in 1892.

The baths by William Hale & Son opened in October 1907.  The facilities included a galleried first-class and second-class swimming bath (both for men only), first- and second-class private baths for men and women, a small laundry, a clubroom and the public library.

In recent years problems with the building and with budgetary cutbacks have repeatedly threatened the complex since its Grade II listing was upgraded to II* in 2004.

It is one of only three Grade II* listed swimming baths in the country.  Its irreplaceable features include the only remaining complete set of forty-six pre-war slipper baths in Great Britain, still with the original oak ticket office and attendants’ kiosks largely intact, the money-taker’s flat, a vast cold-water tank and, in the first-floor laundry, what may be the only surviving steam-heated drying racks in a British swimming baths:  http://www.poolofmemories.co.uk/explore-the-building.

The photographer Mike Jones’ images of the baths are at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2942386/Haunting-images-Edwardian-swimming-baths-built-1907-lying-abandoned.html.

Update:  At last, it seems the future of the baths has turned a corner:  https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/the-next-steps-for-moseley-road-baths.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

Bloomsbury Library, Nechells, Birmingham

One of the smallest and most magical of Birmingham’s terracotta municipal libraries is Bloomsbury Library at Nechells, designed by Jethro Anstice Cossins and Barry Peacock and opened in 1892.

Its wedge-shaped footprint shows that Bloomsbury Library once dominated a road-junction;  now the ring-road intersection dominates it.

The attached police and fire station has been demolished.

The largest of the exterior relief panels by the Birmingham artist Benjamin Creswick shows a female figure representing Birmingham receiving the gifts of the city’s Arts, Crafts and Industries.  The others reflect the life of the community that the building was built to serve – agriculture and industry, sport and home life from childhood to old age.

The Library was restored in 1993, and when I last visited in 2013 it was fully functioning, though the entrance was shored up and planned renovations were on hold.  Since then its condition has gone from bad to worse and is now dire.

The heating system is beyond repair and the theft of lead from the roof has caused sufficient water ingress to close the place.

The Birmingham Mail has revealed that the library staff have been quietly told that the game is up [http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/local-news/historic-birmingham-library-closes-after-6247779] and this has been tacitly confirmed by a local councillor:  [https://birminghamlibrariescampaigns.wordpress.com/2013/12/13/the-future-of-bloomsbury-library-in-nechels].

Library services to the local community are being maintained by a mobile library [http://www.libraryofbirmingham.com/1318249091974] and the library was offered for lease at a peppercorn rent with a guide-price, £100,000, that reflected the amount that would be needed to make the Grade II listed building useable again:  http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-48428552.html.  According to the Victorian Society, it was sold at the end of October 2014.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

Spring Hill Library, Ladywood, Birmingham

Spinning round the roundabout on Icknield Street, Ladywood, on the outskirts of central Birmingham, you could be forgiven for thinking that Spring Hill Library was a church, because of its imposing 65-foot clock tower.

In fact, William Martin’s 1893 design in a fortissimo version of Martin & Chamberlain’s characteristic Gothic dominates what was once a street-corner site and is now an island on the Middle Ring Road.

The original layout placed a double-height public reading-room on the ground-floor with a closed-access lending library in the gallery upstairs.  This formation was reversed in 1926, to give easier access to lending-library users by extending the gallery as a reading room and cluttering the ground-floor space with shelves.

The library was an immediate success, breaking Birmingham city branch libraries’ record for issuing books in its first year of operation.  There was an incident in 1895 when a youth was sentenced to six weeks’ hard labour for “throwing books around the library and resisting arrest”.

The exterior bears the scars of a much later drama, when a number 8 bus was in collision with a fire engine and overturned, killing one and injuring over thirty more.

When Ladywood was redeveloped in the early 1970s, the intended path of the ring road was realigned in response to loud objections to the demolition of the library.

More recently, the surrounding redevelopment has itself been redeveloped by the construction of a splendid Tesco supermarket which opened in 2010 and provided the Victorian library with a practical entrance and a lift.

Four years later, this functioning branch library was threatened by closure because of the financial constraints on the city council:  http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/four-birmingham-libraries-facing-closure-6556612.

Public libraries are an endangered species, Grade II* building less so.  But it would be a pity if Spring Hill Library ceased to be the home of books.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.