Boob Tube or the New Birmingham? 2003

Sitting in the office today waiting for documents to upload to the clients’ FTP site the computer monitior gores into sleep mode and displays images of dramatic landscapes  on  a loop, sunrise over fjords, sunrise over paddy fields, and something resembling a giant sequined boob tube that anyone who has been to Birmingham in the last ten years will recognise. Which reminded me of Hugh Pearman’s review of Future Systems’ Selfridges store in the Sunday Times in the April of 2003, and a line that has stayed with me: ‘Whether you regard the building as an exotic toadstool, a sequined boob tube or an alien spacecraft is immaterial. This is already the new Birmingham’.

Having explored the Bull Ring Centre in an earlier posts  ‘Into the concrete jungle ‘ and ‘I see No ships’ some five years earlier this is an account of my first impression of the new Bull Ring on the opening night in December 2003. Approaching  from the  base of the Rotunda.as as per ten years earlier. Gone is the aroma of KFC, the cash point queue for Lloyd’s Bank and the constant wall of buses.  Lower New Street and High Street are pedestrianised and the area has a feel of Konstablerwache in Frankfurt, which is quite fitting really with Birmingham being twinned with Frankfurt, and the pedestrianised street connecting Konstablerwache and Hauptewache being the location of the Birmingham Pub. No ‘Peek and Cloppenburg’ in this version though.
Heading off towards the Zielgallerie or is it the Bull Ring? with hoards of people rushing in all directions... bronze bull in front of shear glass façade must be the Bull Ring! The bronze bull is a major attraction with lots of people having their photographs taken sitting on top of it. The ‘Square’ anything but square, is populated by solid sculptural granite blocks, set into the artificial ground acting as benches. The bull ring incidentally has nothing to do with Bull fighting, its name is derived from a cast iron ring set in the ground outside a butcher shop where cattle were tethered before being converted into steaks. I guess the matador metaphor is more appealing.

On passing the bull, the street is lined with brand new designer shops and gently slopes down to the internal environment, where the external bustle is replaced with noise...like that of a school swimming gala, with high pitched voices bouncing off the hard surfaces...shopfronts, marble floors glass roof. High street brands proudly exhibited in a series of galleries surrounding a  3 storey void with wide bridges and massively overcrowded escalators: value engineering perhaps? transporting people down into the pit. A walk along the mall passes food outlets with street style seating outside, with glimpses through to the outside where St Martins sits in its new surroundings. Passing the interminable array of new shopfronts the letters LEGO stand out from all the usual high street shops, and a look inside reveals lego models on glass cases, wall to wall lego kits and the back wall, the back wall! Lego bricks and components in cylindrical cubbyholes set into the wall, pick up a bag and select the pieces you need, how cool is that?

At the end of the mall Selfridges forces its organic facade into the scene making all the other facades seem bland by comparison. The high gloss white free form shapes that up until now has only been visible in the books of Future Systems, or the many proposals that appear in the Architectural journals and remain proposals with the exception of the Lords Media Centre; is manifested for real. A walk inside, the aroma of raw fish, not the fish market but Yo! Sushi along with other food bars lined with occupied stools the place is absolutely buzzing! At the heart of the store is another Bull, this time made of jellybeans, probably in the location that I found the statue of Nelson years before, but in this new space city who can tell? A ride up the escalator through the pristine white free form void feels like a journey into the future, or is it a possible future illustrated in movies like Logan’s Run, but for now this feels fresh and exciting and a definite leap forward from the world outside. An orange pod dominates the the middle floor, and inside the most amazing bookshop, comprising the best collection of architecture books I have seen outside the RIBA, along with books on art, interior design, and ‘The Earth from the Air’ Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s most startling array of aerial photographs documenting man’s impact on the planet. At level 3 the retail floor morphs into a lobby that springs a dramatic bridge across the traffic far below to connect with a pretty ordinary car park.  Next to the traffic is the newly restored Moor Street Station, previously a ruin concealed beneath high walls and office blocks, now proudly taking its place in the city again, complete with preserved a steam locomotive sitting alongside the platform. The lobby is lined with hundreds of pictures of people, hundreds making up a montage that instantly says to me what the city is about...its citizens.

Descending through a smaller jellybean shaped void criss-crossed by escalators, with trademark Future Systems lime green trim, in this case the brushes that line the treads.. On leaving the world of of the Future on the intermediate level of the mall shopfronts march along to a shear glass wall, and out into the night, a new street that forms a pedestrianised route back up the hill to Frankfurt, is lined with very busy restaurants, and a look down the hill, there is Nelson! his stature restored statue to its  to its original position. At the edge of what is now called nelson square, a balustrade defines the perimeter of the sunken plaza, which looks as though an archaeological dig has unearthed the church as an 11th century artifact, which like Nelson has been newly restored and looks all the more dramatic against the sequined backdrop of Selfridges a building conceived as department store without windows has a positive relationship with multiple walkways penetrating the facade at different levels. The gently curving volume encompassing St Martins. gives a real sense of the layers that make up the city, the new proudly sitting next to the old in a place that has brought life back into the city.

The outdoor market has been displaced across Edgbaston Street, that runs along the southern edge of the scheme, although the continuum of new public squares and the central street that meander their way up the hill to the Rotunda connect the markets to the city more successfully than the previous version with its network of subways, beneath the traffic . Along Edgbaston Street, a new market hall and multi-storey car park on the South Side, and on the north side a confused jumble of brick, stone and glass facades try unsuccessfully to disguise that back of the retail units that have their frontage inside the mall, the result a four storey facade with absolutely no chance of fitting into the urban grain or addressing its context. In the build up to the opening of the New Bull Ring, there has been a lot of media attention on Selfridges and some ordinary people in the street passing less than complimentary comments on Central News, strange how nobody has been asked to comment on the rest of the scheme, I supposed clad in brick it is camouflaged and nobody has noticed it. At the end of Edgbaston Street, the fragments of the old Bull Ring Centre remain, the Midland Red bus station still sits beneath Smallbrook Queensway, although now a loading bay for the retail units of the new scheme. A spiral stair in a glass block tower makes the ascent to Smallbrook Queensway, and opposite the department store block of the Bull Ring Centre of 1964, newly refurbished and doing what it has been doing for the past 39 years, now branded as TK Maxx, crossing the road at high level, the same concrete bridge now with metal cladding, crashes into the new department store to balance out the Future as exhibited with Selfridges, n this case Debenhams, looking very much a product of the 1980’s. At the top of Smallbrook Queensway, retail units are  suspended off huge steel trusses pinned into the base of the Rotunda, one can only guess it is to maximise retail space whilst avoiding the railway lines running beneath the street.

So for any wondering what the image on the windows screen saver is, ...the silver discs on a curving blue background...there you have it, it is a department store representing the future of Birmingham, inspired by a Paco Rabane sequined dress, or so I am told.

28 Days Later...Riyadh 2010

This was not actually 28 days after I arrived, it is more like 15, but the title is taken from the Danny Boyle movie of the same name because walking around the streets of the city during the Eid holidays was very similar to the way that London was depicted. Completely deserted, it is about 10 in the morning and there is nothing, not a single car moving along the road and it looks like I am the only mad fool walking outside during the heat of the day. Having grown up in the UK, the appearance of the sun without clouds is such a rare event that we don’t feel the need to hide away from it.

The ability to cross what would normally be 6 - 10 lanes of traffic is quite a novelty though. Heading westward roughly in the direction of the two towers, or at least one of them, the route threads its way through back streets lined by villas behind blank walls, with the canopies of trees poking out over the top as though nature and life itself is hemmed in. Walking along what passes for pavements or side walks becomes quite a challenge as trees are planted down the middle, where small shops line the road, the pavement disappears and becomes parking, eyes peep out from the darkness of the shop hoping that you have walked this way to buy an antique toaster.

As the side road joins the main road, Faisaliah appears above the featureless plain of low rise retail units, that stretch as far as the eye can see, some familiar names appear, like British Home Stores (BHS) adorned in English and Arabic on a distinctly closed Arabic themed concrete box across an empty car park. (or is it parking lot?). The roads are lined with date palms interspersed with lollipop trees, not that lollipops grow on them, but they are clipped to look like lollipops, in an ongoing attempt to ‘green’ the city plastic pipes thread through sparse ground cover planting and discarded empty (non-alcoholic) beer bottles. The shiny surface of the deserted road still looks like it has rained during the night, but there has been no rain for months, its is just the residue of rubber polished by the usual deluge of cars. There are no road markings only stainless steel studs.

Crossing to the shaded side of the road, not exactly shaded but slightly less in the full glare of morning sun, maybe a degree cooler, The continuous plane of four storey concrete retail blocks is interrupted occasionally by the lack of retail block, faded timber hoardings with rampant vegetation clinging to the corners of the vacant lot, in others the vacant lot is an area of levelled sand, and absolutely nothing else. The blocks themselves are about the same size, with retail showroom on the ground floor, currently hidden behind roller shutters, the upper levels being probably storage, apartments or offices, behind the myriad of different window shapes and air conditioning units planted onto the facade.

Following the curve of the road, alongside the palms and lollipops, blocks or lack of blocks, the space opens up into a park, rock formations, green slopes, clusters of date palms, interspersed with roads on legs, roads looping around beneath the over pass, and legs without roads!  Columns adorned in silver cladding and a yellow cap topped off with the Saudi Flag.  New glass office blocks loom up around the perimeter of what has become known as Cairo Junction, without a pyramid in sight. The blocks get bigger as the road heads north, still the same format, showroom at ground floor, with offices or apartments above, the street is punctuated with parked cars, jersey blocks trying to prevent it, and yellow skips, each skip with its colony of alley cats awaiting the next delivery of discarded food. In the distance the two towers that define the skyline come in to view along with the sense of how far I have already walked this morning. Continuing the journey Northwards, The Faisaliah Centre, Foster’s first project in Saudi.. is far more than the tower, that I had seen on the skyline, he first view on approaching from down town is the name Harvey Nicholls on the face of a sandstone coloured concrete wall, located behind a row of palm trees and jersey blocks. A desert sand coloured GMC truck with a machine gun in a turret on the back says that the owners don’t really want you hanging around taking photographs, beyond the truck, the base of the tower can be seen at the end of a manicured lawn that ends in a water feature where water cascades down over a stone depiction of the facade of the tower only to disappear behind the jersey blocks to the street edge

Continuing Northwards along the street edge the glass facades of the office blocks reflect the empty roads, line with their date palms, footbridges span the King Fahd Road, or at least they span the six lanes of the main road, to deposit the pedestrian on an island to then cross another two lanes of road. Between the blocks piles of construction materials deposited at the street edge await the process of assembly into some kind of order, steel beams, reinforcement, street furniture all deposited at the side of the road. A  small area of green, a few date palms and a deserted playground behind green steel fencing. Tower cranes crowd around the concrete skeleton, of what will become the twin towers of Riyadh’s World Trade Centre, now standing silent as work is suspended for the holidays. A the north end of the strip, Kingdom Tower, with its shear glass facade giving a clear reflection of the urban devastation at its base, or is it simply that it is under construction? A sand bank with an archetypal American yellow GMC school bus perched on top of it. A twisted bent steel sculpture that was once a car before it hit something solid lays rusting on a rough patch of sand.

Around the corner the hot flint smell of the sand is replaced by the rich smell of vegetation, the air temperature drops as trees shade the baking sidewalks, fountains playfully throw water into the air the familiar names Debenhams and Marks and Spencer become visible through the trees, flanking the base of the Kingdom Tower, that bursts up through the canopy and for a moment the feeling of being in the hottest capital on earth is replaced with that of arriving at an oasis, a feeling that is quickly suppressed by the presence of the ever present jersey blocks and trucks with machine guns guarding the entrance.

Heading South along Olaya Street, the sense that this is the front door to the strip in inescapable as the names from the glossy magazines proudly stand up to the street edge, Bulgari appears behind a planar glass storefront, with marble sidewalk taking their place among the older showrooms with parking lots out front making the walk along the sidewalk somewhat impossible. On the opposite side of the street, across the ten lanes of traffic, if there were any, in places the sidewalk disappears completely to reveal a hole some five storeys deep, framed only by lightweight timber hoarding. All adding to the sense that that this is very much a city in the making.

The Need for Speed

A slight departure from the subject of architecture this week because surfing the BBC website during the week, I learned that this is the week of the 75th anniversary of Mallard’s world record run where 126mph was recorded near Grantham, Lincolnshire on 3rd July 1938 a record that still stands as a world record for steam traction, and a reminder that I was mad on trains as a kid.

Mallard? not a duck but a steam locomotive named after it designed by Sir Nigel Gresley, distinctive by its steamlined body shape. To mark the anniversary Mallard and the five remaining sisters have been reunited, a reunion that involved shipping two from the US and Canada, and suddenly it seems it is cool to be interested in trains again,  if only for a short time. For the numbers already flocking to the National Railway Museum (NRM) in York, most of this summer’s ticketed events are already sold out this probably represents a once in a lifetime opportunity to view these impressive machines in the same place. The theme of the exhibition as shown on the NRM website is understandably about the quest for speed.

Considering where I am writing this, Bahrain, a country yet to posses a railway, interest in trains must seem strange if not a little absurd. What is it that draws the huge numbers of people to a gathering of machines? The love of steam? A romantic view of travel in the 1930’s perhaps? are they really celebrating visions of how life was much simpler in those days, no television, no computers, few cars, few telephones, along with smog, poor air quality and health problems as the whole country ran on coal. Travel was concentrated on summer excursions to the seaside...Blackpool, Skegness, The English Riviera, by train naturally.

For me it is about something else entirely, it is about national identity, and the period in history probably represents Britishness at its height, regarded as world leaders, the names of two of those locomotives in the exhibition a standing testament to the sprit of the age. ‘Union of South Africa’ and ‘Dominion of Canada’ the two living reminders of the Empire, when everything was wonderful (at least from a British point of view), one fifth of the globe was coloured pink, and represented a well behaved world governed by the British, through colonies, protectorates and dominions, with progress considered to be in the name of the common good regardless of consequences. Tea came from Yorkshire, chocolate from Bourneville, the origins of those products idealised on the packaging.

Birmingham was considered the workshop of the world, Liverpool was the city of trade, receiving goods and passengers from all around the world, Manchester supplied the world with textiles, the best Steel came from Sheffield and the railway was the vital lifeline that held it all together. The year 1938 represents Great Britain at its height, a year before the outbreak of WWII, when Britain was last considered ‘Great’ and the future looked bright. Six years later ‘British Made’ no longer had the same meaning, and so started the trend of importing goods made far more cheaply in South East Asia, and with it the decline of industry in Britain.

75 years later are we celebrating advances in engineering of are we lamenting the loss of something quite different?