It is July 2015 and almost 2 years since my previous visit to the city and it is a city that is largely in bits, from massive reorganisation in the centre, to retrofitting infrastructure it is a city undergoing open-heart surgery on a vast scale. Outside the confines of the New Street Station and Grand Central redevelopment, slow movement until the bus finds its allocated slot along Corporation Street, and the final lurch to a stop is no longer a way of arriving into Birmingham, still in the rain, Corporation street is closed to traffic, tram lines are being reinstated in the street surface which is a welcome sight, a sense of rediscovering what was lost in the 1960s.
Crossing Corporation street and passing the end of what was once Martineau Square, Commercial Union House still sits above a retail podium, clad in yellow concrete and blue glazing frames seemingly dominated by a singe retailer ‘Poundland’, the development branded as Martineau Galleries, replaced the rain soaked precinct, and the deserted plaza, first experienced on arrival in Birmingham in 1993, which is no longer deserted, it is dominated by a busy and now well established Sainsbury’s store in the city centre with its plaza surrounded by coffee shops partly covered by Teflon coated fabric canopies that arrived in the 2000s in stark contrast to both the concrete environment of its predecessor and in urban terms to the big box out of town retail park that is so prevalent in the UK.
Walking down the pedestrianised Union Street that crosses Corporation Street, and heading down to High Street or is the pedestrianised surface between Frankfurt’s Konstablewache and Hauptewache with a glass tower at the end resembling the Rotunda? Part of the pristine concrete paved surface has been displaced by site hoardings and cabins, notices on the cabins talk of Birmingham becoming a sustainable city, and in the trench in the ground below the surface a district heating main is being installed, part of the Birmingham District Energy Scheme, a tri-generation project producing heat, power, and chilled water, which aims to reduce CO emissions by 60%.
The back story is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble published by Xlibris - Do We Need ARCHITECTS?
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