Bullring T Minus 365days
I was lucky enough to get a sneak peak of the inside of the Bullring while the redevelopment was occuring, these photos were taken a year before the Bullring opened. The concrete went, the area was totally changed and it now stands as a glass homage to the god of shopping, with more than a million square foot of retailing heaven … Welcome to Birmingham.
As with many things in the city of Birmingham, everything changes, over the past 15 years Birmingham has undergone a complete rethink, with new areas being created to this very day. Never a city to be affraid of trying something new and breaking all the rules, we now don’t have Christmas we have “Winterfest”, a sad and depressing reflection on how even the attitudes in the cities leaders have changed to attract the attention of being a city of cultre.
The Bullring was in the 1960’s a monument to the idea of what a modern British city was to be like at that time, where people walked below the cars, where concrete was king and by the time Birmingham was choked by the concrete collar, which was the local term for the huge ringroad stopping the city from expanding, things had to change.
With any change there is always a downside
5 long painful years of never being able to find your bus stop, a new road layout known as the bus mall that was a death trap to people that atempted to cross its confusing bidirectional lanes, never ending miles of plywood walkways, oh yes and the Bronze Bull that got vandalised , all the way up to the iconic Selfridges facade, the Bullring development has helped put Birmingham well and truely on the map, but at what cost to local retailers and anyone who has the misfortune of navigating a still too confusing road layout?
In the following the years after the centre reopened there have been mass exodus’s of independant retailers, who have been forced out by uncompetivie business rates as the big chains roll in, parts of the city have empty shop space just begging for resturants to open in their place, ex office blocks are now turned into appartments, city living is back with an agressive marketing pitch to those lucky enough to afford the dream. How much longer will “clone towns” continue to creep upon and divide along the wealth lines of our great nation? With such developments are we loosing a sense of our appeal to the unstoppable credit/debt retail therapy nation, is this really what we want New Britain to partly be? Whatever the answer Birmingham City Centre is now generally a nicer place to walk around than it was when I were a lad.