As the title suggests this is about mental illness, but not in the traditional sense, but what else to you call it when a significant chunk of city has no relationship with the rest of the city? This is a site that exhibits multiple personalities as it is trying to be in no particular order: railway station, 3 car parks, office block, shopping centre and housing development simulteneously.
The relationship with the city, or lack of it is best demonstrated at the edges, or interfaces. The New Street interface which is closest to the activities of the city centre. is actually the podium containing the Pallasades a shopping centre. Any glimpses of the site from New Street are of the blank concrete wall of shopping centre, which practically obscures any routes from the station to any of the main spaces of the city centre. Ladywood House is an office block that sits uncomfortably on top of the podium, which is similarly divorced from the life of the city. The entrance to the offices is crammed between two retail units at street level, where shop-fronts loom out of the shadows as the deep concrete plinth is propped up over the street sitting on a run of thick concrete columns.
A long ramp crosses the front of the megastructure providing service access to the shopping centre by means of storage units being situated directly above the retail units. The ramp also provides access to the car parks that exist on different levels of the structure resembling a derelict industrial facility. The plane in front of the car park ramp is taken up by the new footbridge, where discoloured glass and white steel turrets sit on the platforms, with white steel and translucent polycarbonate panelled bridge spanning between them, all blackened by the constant onslaught of diesel exhaust smoke. The Navigation Street/Stephenson Place edge, comprises car park entrance ramps, barriers and surveillance cameras, a spiral pedestrian ramp connects the street level to an elevated walkway along the back of the shopping centre above. Although much of the tangle is invisible from the nearest edges of the station, as the whole scene is also hidden from view by a two metre high concrete wall lining the back of the pavement to Navigation Street, and Hill Street.
The second interface is the one that buts up against Hill Street and Station Street. Here much of the site is obscured from view behind the ever present two-metre high wall. This serves to make a one sided street, as the wall turns along Station Street, an opening forms entrances to the car parks and the base of the ramp that cuts across the front of the building. Bridges fl y across the rear access road named ‘Queens Drive’ after the street that used to run through the full length of the Station. One linking the Pallasades with a stair tower that permits access to the bus station that sits beneath the Bull Ring Centre. The second bridge links the corner of the Pallasades to the surviving concrete block of the 1960’s Bull Ring Centre. The Queens Drive forms the taxi route to the main entrance of the station and what sounds like a prestigious address for the residents of Stephenson Tower, which sits on top of the parcel depot, forming what passes for social housing.
At the third Interface, with the new Bull Ring is made up of series of holes in the urban fabric surrounded by the ubiquitous two metre wall constituting landscape which is punctuated by surface level car parking and Birmingham’s infamous one way system of access roads. The Pallasades flies out over the short stay car park and station entrance with its deep concrete plinth sitting on columns making for another dark entrance. Not exactly the way you want to arrive in to the UK's second city.
