Walking through Birmingham at 2am, the only sound is the occasional lorry bringing stock from around to world to sell in its enormous shopping centre, The Bullring. Apart from that the city is icily quiet, as if even the drunks couldn't bother to be here.
Cities are like people. To age gracefully, what's wanted is a nip here, a tuck there. The French do it well. Streets, like the wrinkles on the face, grow according to the demands of use: only a foolish surgeon would aims to override their contours entirely. And to keep a city beautiful, the planner must, like a face, protect at all costs the features that make it unique.
Industrial towns have their own kind of gruff beauty, deserving of respect. But over the years Birmingham's town planners, like surgery addicts, have allowed developers to perform ever more gruesome intervention.
It started 210 years ago. Back then the centre of Birmingham was an informal market and a network of narrow streets. Prompted by 'disorderly behaviour' and political protests, town planners began to buy up buildings in the area and demolish them. By 1810, Corn Cheaping Street, The Shambles and Cock Street were flattened.
The next great clearance came in WW2. The Free Grammar School was demolished; the glass-roofed Victorian New Street Station was damaged by bombs and never repaired. Then the decision was made to replace Birmingham's centre with a shopping mall. Laing Construction were charged with its execution. The Market Hall was demolished, so was the Fish Market. Spiceal Street and Jamaica Row were flattened. The first Birmingham Bull Ring centre opened in 1964.
Wikipedia says: "The 1960s Bull Ring Centre had problems from the beginning and was very much a product of its era. At the time of its opening it was considered the height of modernity, but higher rentals within the shopping centre meant that traders turned away from it. The public were also less inclined to use the subways and escalators, which stopped working regularly. Also, it did not age well and soon became generally regarded as an unfortunate example of 1960s Brutalist architecture, with its boxy grey concrete design and its isolation within ringroads connected only by dangerous subways. It was, in later days, much disliked by the public and contributed to the popular conception that Birmingham was a concrete jungle of shopping centres and motorways."
20 years after its opening, developers put forward an application to demolish it. It took another 20 years to persuade the public. The job was done by Laing O'Rourke (by now the UK's biggest private developers company - O'Rourke had bought up Laing Construction).
It occupies the entire city centre, bawling out its brand names from the walls. Rather than being designed according to the existing city map, the streets have been reconstructed in obedience to the shopping centre. Its gigantic size seems to have been non-negotiable: the citizen must walk into the complex or go through a forbidding concrete underpass beneath it. This is an environment that actively hates the pedestrian: whole roads are car-only; unfriendly concrete benches are scattered beside the road, as though ironically. Curving tunnels, like tentacles, are flung between the buildings above your head.
It physically dwarfs all other buildings around it. It's enormous size seems unsustainable. How does the mall make enough money from its environs to support itself? Surely it's a mistake to put faith in Selfridges everlasting? What will be done with this building once they're gone?
Away from the shadow of the mall the depressed former high street is pocked with abandoned lots. Here and there on the remaining old brick walls are fading painted signs of what the city used to produce: Malox healthy dog food, Birmingham leathers, Birmingham silks.
