Bright’s exhortations for the Council to reject retrenchment and focus its energies on the elevation of the moral, aesthetic and physiological condition of its citizens seemingly did not fall on deaf ears. Yet the legacy of the Civic Gospel, as executed by Chamberlain, is much more difficult to reconcile with the humanitarian and ‘improving’ tenets on which it was built. On the one hand, the extent of these constructions and acquisitions made these decades the most dramatic in Birmingham’s history, certainly down to the reconstruction of the 1960s. As Victor Skipp notes, ‘to many Brummies... high Victorian Birmingham did bear some resemblance to the promised land, a holy city’.46 Was he incorrect in his assessment? Brewer’s drawing certainly proclaims a proud, distinguished and improved city to its viewer, replete with buildings which are clearly articulated in terms of the improving tenets on which the Civic Gospel was constructed. Surely the abundance of grand edifices depicted in the image: a new Council House (1879); Art Gallery (1885); a new Reference Library (1882); the Chamberlain Memorial Foundation (1880) must have instilled a degree of civic pride in the citizen of Victorian Birmingham. In the final analysis, it is impossible to omit a brass relief which appears just as one enters the entrance to the Art Gallery extension of Yeoville Thomason’s Council House, the building which occupies the prominent central position in Brewer’s drawing. A motto inscribed below it simply reads: ‘By the Gains of Industry We Promote Art’. A closer analysis of the impact of Chamberlain’s Improvement Scheme, and indeed the contemporary criticism it attracted, arguably reveals that the Civic Gospel, however noble an idea in its genesis, swiftly became a populist rhetorical device used to legitimise local entrepreneurialism and the hegemony of business interests. Furthermore, a study of the architecture of the Improvement Plan depicts the Civic Gospel as a powerful symbolic tool, able to outwardly project the semblance of progressive, humanitarian ‘improvement’ whilst maintaining the reality of order and control. Birmingham’s local governance would effectively remain in the hands of businessmen until the ‘slow emergence of
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