Birmingham: A New Albion

The Bullring has always been the heart of Birmingham upon which its fortunes were built or lost and the New Bullring is an essential starting point for any investigation into the city’s renaissance.

Millennium Point, like many of the country’s other millennium projects (mentioning no names), can at best be described as a noble failure, but it is still worth a look if only for curiosity value.

Brindley Place and The Mailbox are pleasant diversion which between them offer plenty of high-end retail and fine dining for those that can afford them and a chance to see how the other half live for those that can’t.

Quick Tips:

The new government run Welcome Centre on New Street offers all the tourist information you could need for your exploration of the city and there are numerous leaflets for inspiration on what to do next.

The Central Library in Chamberlain Square contains numerous books to browse about the city and its history and also provides Internet access for further research or for writing e-mails home.

Best Way To Get Around:

All of the sites covered in this journal are within a 1km walk of the city centre and wandering between them will give you opportunity to see more of this booming city, maps can be obtained from the Welcome Centre on New Street.

The West Midlands has an extensive bus network that will ferry you to all corners of the county for a maximum single fair of £1.30 for more extended travel you can get a day saver for £2.60 or a family saver for £5.

There are two major train stations next to the Bullring, New Street (the busiest station in Europe) for trains to all parts of Britain and Moor Street for cheap trains to London Marlyebone (£15 return, conditions apply).

Birmingham International Airport lies a few kilometres from the city centre and Birmingham’s central location and convenient public transport links makes it an ideal base for exploring the country.

One of the oldest historic documents relating to Britain’s second city is the 1156 charter awarding the city the right to hold a market. The site of that market outside the front of St Martin’s Church has been the heart of the city’s shopping district ever since and is now home to the new Bullring.

The old Bullring opened in May 1964 was a masterpiece of ‘60s architecture, with great concrete blocks encircled by miles of ring-roads it was everything that the post-war city-planners dreamed of and did much to drag Birmingham out of the depression, but by the late 80s it had become an outdated eyesore. Demolition of this behemoth began on the 30th June 2000 and the new Bullring with its 110,000 sq. meters of shop floor space (roughly equivalent to the area of 26 football pitches) opened to great fanfare on 4th September 2003.

Three tall carbon fibre Light Wands on the corner of New Street and High Street act as beacons drawing you into the heart of architects Benoy’s confused design, which restores the city’s old street plan, obliterated by the 60s construction, and where you will find sculptor Laurence Broderick’s five-tonne bronze bull, ancient Brummie tradition dating back to, well 4th September 2003, says that rubbing the bulls nose will bring good luck.

The three levels of brand-name shops are anchored at either end by two massive department stores, the futuristic design of Selfridges with its curious range of stylish clothing and furnishings and the modern glass design of Debenhams, with it’s more staid styles. In between these two extremes the architects play with form and feature and work their way around the 18th century church to create a mess of clashing styles that can be taxing on the eye.

The lower floor combines a variety of high street shops including Athena and the quaint Teddy Bear Factory and a collection of outdoor dining opportunities crowded around Gross Max’s modernistic water features in the courtyard out front, including EAT and the Indian themed Tiffin Bites. The shops on the middle floor are aimed at the youth market, with a variety of younger fashion stores including Mango and FCUK. Things are taken up a level, quite literally, on the top floor with a variety of aspirational fashion stores including Lacoste and Swarovski.

Around the back of the massive building the markets too survive with an outdoor market specialising in fresh fruit and vegetables and two new indoor markets, one selling meat and fish and the other packed with all sorts of bargain stalls, this is where Brum truly comes to life.

This development has helped to re-establish Birmingham as one of the premier shopping centres in England and makes a wonderful centrepiece for the city’s retail centre. While the Bullring may not be quite reason enough on its own for you to visit Birmingham, its central location makes it an attraction not to be missed when you do visit.

Opened in December 2000, this is Britain’s largest mixed use building and it owes its name to the fact that it was built on the former site of Birmingham’s main postal sorting office. It offers a variety of shops and restaurants as well as leisure facilities, residential and office space and two hotels!

The fashion choices on offer include such famous designer brands as DKNY, Emporio Armani, and Hugo Boss, as well as such local boutiques as Ronit Zilka, Thomas Pink, and Tim Little. The lifestyle options range from the Aga Shop and the Iron Bed Company to that doyen of lifestyle shopping, Harvey Nichols.

Food options are equally as varied and include sushi from Shogun, pizza at Zizzi, fine dinning in Paris, and you can even try new Mexican cuisine (whatever that is) at Santa Fe; for the really adventurous, there is the curiously named Denial, which specializes in the worryingly-named modern British cuisine (good luck)!

If all this activity is starting to wear you out, you can pamper yourself with a haircut at Toni & Guy’s, a massage at Malmaison Spa, or a full beauty treatment at Obsession Salon; if you really can’t bear to leave, why not take a room at the Days Inn or a suite at Malmaison?

Clearly, all this must be a big draw for those high living media types as the BBC is to close its hallowed Pebble Mill studios and move its West Midlands operations here; there will even be a discovery centre so the curious can find out what exactly the corporation does with all that license fee money you keep paying them.

Set in a beautifully restored canal basin, the Mailbox provides an excellent brake from the trials of city centre shopping and it is well worth breaking for lunch here if you have the money.

Opened by HM Queen Betty in July 2002, this £114 million development on a run-down brown fields site on the edge of the city centre was designed to provide Birmingham a centre for science, technology, and learning and to act as a catalyst for the redevelopment of the city’s so called learning quarter.

The futuristic building from architects Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners is certainly impressive, nowhere more so than in The Hub, the buildings central forum, with its five floors (three of which are ground floors due to its hill side location) decorated in a high-tech style. There is also a small landscaped garden out front with a nice fountain and a curiously designed climbing frame to keep the young’uns bemused. It is, however, something of a victory of style over content as the development’s location, although handy from Aston University and Aston Science Park, is perceived by many as being too distant from the heart of the city and this seems to have proved something of a barrier to encouraging businesses to relocate here.

Around half of the building is taken up by the Thinktank, the city’s new science and technology museum with an exciting range of exhibits that according to the marketing blurb "explore everything from locomotives and aircraft to intestines and spit glands" and include its star attraction the oldest working steam engine in Britain. Entry costs £6.95/£5.50/£4.95 and will cover you for the day. Facilities include education rooms, a theatre, a café and a gift shop. The museum also runs an IMAX theatre on the site, although opening times can be erratic and it was closed for a while due to poor turnout, it has now reopened and shows a changing programme of educational films.

Other tenants include the Technology Innovation Centre (TIC), which is the technical division of the University of Central England (UCE), the University of the First Age, which is a curious experiment in bringing extra-curricula educational opportunities to the 11-14 year old age group and its subdivision the Young People’s Parliament, which aims to get young people more involved in the country’s political system. Other tenants include West Midlands Regional Observatory, Marketing Birmingham, and Pastico, a small café serving the standard fare of overpriced coffee and sandwiches, and of course that cutting edge organization, the Royal College of Organists.

We will have to wait and see if the City Planners’ dreams of a learning quarter will come to fruition, but in the meantime Millennium Point is something of a curiosity for visitors, with little to attract you here, unless you want to see the Science and Technology museum, it is hardly worth going out of your way for.

This five-acre leisure plaza is the crowning glory of Birmingham city planners "Go For Big, Broad Street" development plan to turn this long forgotten corner of the city centre into the heart if the city’s nightlife, with bars, restaurants and entertainment opportunities aplenty. The site was formerly occupied by the Birmingham Children’s Hospital and the façade of the 1917 listed hospital building has been retained and incorporated into developers Morrison Property Solutions Ltd designs for this modernist European styled plaza complex of glass, steel and brick.

A large part of the plaza’s five acres is taken up by a 12-screen multiplex cinema from the American corporation, who sell their cinema on its state-of-the-art Dolby EX sound system and what it curiously describes as "LoveSeats® with retractable armrests and AMC's signature cup holders". There is also the typically soulless Starlight Bar where you can stop-off for an overpriced drink if you arrive too early. The weekly program of Hollywood popcorn flicks and the occasional Indy breakthrough movie is available at http://www.amctheatres.com.

The plaza’s other big draw is the 12-lane bowling alley with all the usual facilities including the bar and grill, Pool Pit and Video World computer games arcade. Eating and drinking options are currently quite limited with only the Australian-themed Outback Steakhouse providing an alternative to US junk food giants Domino’s Pizza and Subway, but all this is set to change with the opening of Pacific Blue, which promises to supplement its extensive bar and limited menu with live jazz at the weekends.

The rest of the development is given over to the 114 apartments City Living residential complex, an Esporta fitness centre and of course a large number of empty units. While the development may not be much to look at, at the moment, when it is fully occupied it has the potential to be one of the city’s premier entertainment complexes, breathing new life into the Five Ways area and become the heart of its redevelopment.