Under the Eye of Mordor, Austin Village

Image: © A J Paxton Taken: 16 Sep 2023

These are three of the two hundred cedarwood houses of the 'Chester' type imported from the USA by Herbert Austin and erected in Longbridge, Birmingham in 1917 to house wartime workers at his factory. Six or seven women munitions workers would typically live in each three-bedroomed bungalow. They were well-appointed by British standards of the time, with an indoor toilet, and central heating powered by a coke-fired boiler. The houses have survived, in private ownership and in various stages of modernisation. The middle house of the three shown here is probably the best-preserved and is a grade A locally-listed building (see the Birmingham list https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/downloads/download/273/locally_listed_buildings ). It appears to have retained its original wooden clapboarding, used at Austin Village in place of the wooden shingles of the North American house. The American open porch was glazed over in the Austin Village version, supposedly because of the inclement British weather, but also perhaps because sitting on your porch or in your front garden is a very un-British thing to do. Wooden houses require regular maintenance, and over time they have been modernised by their owners, as the houses to either side illustrate, giving the area a varied appearance, very like that of suburbs in the USA and Canada, but disapproved of by conservationists. The village was declared a conservation area in 1997 but now risks losing this status, which would in turn increase the risk of developers buying up plots and replacing the historic bungalows with higher-density housing. One such developer is apparently known to local people as 'The Eye of Mordor'. On the Chester house see the Austin Village stories site https://www.theaustinvillage.com/new-page . On the conservation debate, see Image

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