Guest Post: The Wickedest Street in Britain

Regular readers will know that I do these guest posts when we pass some significant or round figure in total page hits. 162,330 is not perhaps round or significant but it's certainly satisfying so the time is here. 

This is about the history of a road in Balsall Heath. The subsequent clear up of the area is a total other history and the city's red light district subsequently moved to Edgbaston before moving onto the internet and any odd corner. The Hound thinks licensing sex work is the way ahead, but nobody listens to me.

The piece is called Revisiting the Wickedest Road in Britain and is by Professor Val Williams. It is about the photographer Janet Mendelssohn.

'Mendelsohn was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University   from 1967 to 1969. Having studied Social Relations at Harvard’s all-women Radcliffe College, Mendelsohn became interested in documentary photography; in Birmingham she decided to study social conditions in the inner city, and began to work in and around Varna Road in Balsall Heath.

Originally a sedate and elegant nineteenth century middle- class suburb, by the 1960s, Balsall Heath had become known as Birmingham’s major red light district and as a centre for migration from South Asia. The once-elegant houses fell into decay, and were subdivided into rooming houses and shabby flats. Corner shops, pubs and cafés formed the social hubs of the community, and life on the streets was hectic and crowded. The combination of vitality and cheapness meant that, for a time, Balsall Heath became a draw both for Birmingham’s artistic bohemia and for students, as well as a centre for prostitution. Balsall Heath was a highly visible example of British post-war society in transition, with a complex mix of groups, new populations engaging with the more traditional. Balsall Heath was about to  undergo a relentless process of slum clearance and Varna Road, along with many other streets in the area, would cease to exist.

Mendelsohn’s Varna Road photographs focussed on the life of ‘Kathleen’ – sex worker, mother and Balsall Heath resident. These remarkable photographs, are intimate and collaborative, as Mendelsohn observed  ‘Kathleen’ in her day-to-day life. At the heart of the project are Mendelsohn’s photographs of Kathleen and her family at home.  Though Kathleen’s life was a challenging one, and her circumstances extremely straitened, Mendelsohn’s photographs of her are rich and poetic. Intimate, collaborative. Shot in available light, the gloomy, dishevelled interiors of Kathleen’s rooms assume a kind of grandeur, as with Kathleen as a gaunt but sublime Madonna.  These are photographs full of warmth and compassion, photographs made by a woman about another woman’s life. No two people could have been further apart than the high achieving Radcliffe student and the impoverished Birmingham prostitute, but there is real connection here.

Outside, on the street, in the café, outside the pub, the photography changes and becomes much more of an observation of life in Balsall Heath as reflected through Kathleen and her circle. Mendelsohn accompanies Kathleen as she chats with friends on street corners, pushes her pram, and visits the launderette; she even photographed the broken down bed where Kathleen took her clients. She observes Kathleen with her children in photographs of great poignancy. This is a many-layered study, where empathy meets sheer inquisitiveness on a massive scale.

Source.

A picture gallery of 1960s Varna Road can be found here

Further insight as well as wonderful period shots of the Second City can be found in the film Prostitute.