Wholesale Memory

Music and actors will bring the Birmingham Wholesale Markets site back to life

Born in a back-to-back court in a Hockley slum in 1922, Sir Frank Price, who has died aged ninety-five, was a key figure in the Modernist redevelopment of Birmingham in the 1950s and 60s, and was the last of a remarkable group of self-made and largely self-educated Labour politicians who dominated political life in the city during the postwar decades. A successful businessman with a famously brusque – even aggressive – manner, Price may not have seemed a likely utopian, but the deep seated anger at the poverty and indignity he endured in his youth that led him to join the Young Communist League as a teenager never left him, even as his politics moderated towards a reformist socialism. First elected to Birmingham City Council for the St Paul's ward in 1949 – at the time he was employed as a toolmaker; his employer had not expected him to win and he was dismissed from his job a few weeks after the election – he quickly gained a reputation for outspoken behaviour and pugnacious