18 CONTEXT 178 : DECEMBER 2023 Michael Taylor is editorial coordinator for Context and a former rail commuter through the eastern Birmingham urban fringe. architect. Historic maps and photographs show the estate in pristine countryside and the road to Birmingham as a tree-lined country lane. But by the early 20th century the family had left for its other estates and the house began to come within the force field of the city. By 1912 Coleshill Park had become a retreat house for the Birmingham Anglican Diocese. Then for 60 years from about 1930 it was used as a mental hospital serving Birmingham, its grounds colonised by wards and residential blocks. Now the site stands on an island formed by motorways and HS2. Its seemingly uncongenial location is suited to its current use as a commercial office park. Lynsey Hanley’s Chelmsley Wood estate is just to the south across the M6. This picture of the urban fringe, with its mix of buildings, land uses and infrastructure, is not unique to east Birmingham. Similar places will be familiar to many readers. But is the urban fringe important? George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch is generally considered to be a portrait of society in Coventry, where Eliot lived for part of her life, in the years around 1830. It was a period of intellectual, social and political change in which Eliot was much engaged. It was also a time of change from a rural to an urban, industrial economy, exemplified by the projects and technological optimism of Eliot’s fictional surveyor Caleb Garth. The urban fringe, gradually and patchily changing from rural to urban, is going through a similar process in our own time. The fringe accounts for a huge amount of land around our cities. Growing numbers of people live in its towns, villages and estates. It is an important place for recreation: walking and cycling, fishing, bird watching and botanising. Many thousands of people pass daily through the urban fringe on their commute, or on longer journeys by rail and motorway. The industrial estates, distribution parks and transport infrastructure are essential components of the national economy. The reservoirs and sewage disposal works of the urban fringe helped to make the development of modern life in cities possible. Positive change in the urban fringe could come from responses to current concerns. In Ockendon, Essex, a 70-hectare refuse tip is being developed as a solar farm. The Woodland Trust plans to plant 50 million trees around cities across England in a belt from Liverpool to Hull, in an initiative which could transform the fringes of northern cities. As John Grindrod shows, parts of the urban fringe are protected by green-belt status. But the process of change in the fringe is driven partly by the need for land for housing, and even the green belt is under pressure. Writers like Sinclair, Farley and Symmonds Roberts present a picture of distinct places rather than a characterless intermediate zone between other places. Coleshill and Whitacre show the layered evidence of gradual change, partly driven by the influence of Birmingham and by national communications. The unexpected shapes and abrupt juxtapositions, the mixture of very diverse building types, and the patchwork of water, vegetation and hard surfaces, all serve to make a place of real interest in itself and one which illustrates important aspects of national history. The urban fringe is not as celebrated as areas of outstanding natural beauty or national parks. Nor does it form part of the country’s image of itself as more obviously picturesque landscapes do. But it is a type of countryside. A recognition and understanding of its peculiar character could be a start in devising planning and design policies that enable the fringe to evolve in ways that retain something of its own, often surprising and sometimes strange, sense of place. Wincanton Group warehouse at National Distribution Park, Whitacre
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