Growing Turrets and Increasing Walls: The Politics of Public Space and Institutions

This paper develops an understanding of the reciprocity between the seismic changes to the political and social life of Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century and the physical conditions of the city, with particular reference to Birmingham. The social unrest in Britain after revolutions in America and France was palpable and measures of ethics emerged through practical public philosophies including the Nonconformist doctrine of Utilitarianism under Jeremy Bentham, with the belief that “the aim of government should be the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” At the same time, the city witnessed the emergence of new public and private landscapes and institutions. The Vauxhall Pleasure Garden, a regional copy of Tyer’s celebrated original in London, was located on the eastern fringes of the town, reached by boat and out of sight of religious institutions. The library, which grew from a cupboard accessible by subscription on Union Street with content influenced by the scientist and preacher Joseph Priestley amongst others, laid the foundations for later educational reforms. Conlin associates such projects with the commodification of culture and the rise of the middling rank, and both the pleasure garden (and similar leisurescapes) and library talk of emergent forms of civic life, attitudes to morality and expressions of modernity in provincial Britain. The ‘increasing walls’ of the city as described by Dyer in his poem ‘The Fleece’ therefore becomes the subject of enquiry into issues of public and private space as a social construct, industry and philanthropy, and freedom and liberty in Birmingham during a period of great reform across the nation.