Festiniog blue-grey roof slates : advert issued by the North Wales Slate Quarries Association : Architectural Review, November 1931
As the advert notes the Welsh slate industry had been active for centuries when this advert was issued in 1931 and indeed, countless roofs have been finished in the products of the various quarries in North Wales that were, at the time, numerous and often vast in terms of operation. The advert is also of interest in that it shows the 30,000th municipally constructed 'council' house in Birmingham.
The cast iron street name plate (a real Birmingham production in its own right as it would have been made in the Tramways Department's foundry at Kynotts Lake Road) shows this as corner of Hurlingham Road and Danesbury Crescent in Kingstanding, one of the city's largest pre-WW2 housing schemes. The properties still stand and indeed look to have the original roofs so a century on is not bad! Given that municipal housing was largely a post-WW1 enterprise, the bulk of the legislation allowing for "homes for heros" as well as inner city slum clearance being past int he early 1920s, a total of 30,000 in a decade shows the scale of the enterprise that cities such as Birmingham undertook.
Here's the current scene.
Festiniog blue-grey roof slates : advert issued by the North Wales Slate Quarries Association : Architectural Review, November 1931
As the advert notes the Welsh slate industry had been active for centuries when this advert was issued in 1931 and indeed, countless roofs have been finished in the products of the various quarries in North Wales that were, at the time, numerous and often vast in terms of operation. The advert is also of interest in that it shows the 30,000th municipally constructed 'council' house in Birmingham.
The cast iron street name plate (a real Birmingham production in its own right as it would have been made in the Tramways Department's foundry at Kynotts Lake Road) shows this as corner of Hurlingham Road and Danesbury Crescent in Kingstanding, one of the city's largest pre-WW2 housing schemes. The properties still stand and indeed look to have the original roofs so a century on is not bad! Given that municipal housing was largely a post-WW1 enterprise, the bulk of the legislation allowing for "homes for heros" as well as inner city slum clearance being past int he early 1920s, a total of 30,000 in a decade shows the scale of the enterprise that cities such as Birmingham undertook.
Here's the current scene.