Signs and symbols used as a code to mark listed buildings in Birmingham before a suspicious fire or a demolition order have been revealed, and now ‘experts’ have explained how to protect yours. Look out for these drawing on walls, doors and even bins outside your property.
Some indicate that it’s not worth the effort of battling local opinion, others that they may be a prime target.
“I curse any nights sleep in these flats to be ruined by the ghosts of a thousand lost nights of noise and lights and friends.”
Either you die a mouthy prick who gets barred for throwing the garden furniture into the canal, or you live long enough to see your city turn into a nameless suburb of Blandtopia. I’m drinking in the Flapper steeling myself for another bitter goodbye.
Me and the flapper have history, serious history. I remember being ten on a school trip to the canals in Birmingham. As a class we walked past and I remember the yellow building with arcade games in the window (it was a Firkin pub back then). I asked my teacher, Mr Goode, if we could go in and he just laughed. Possibly because even back then he could see the type of person I’d become. I remember because it was the only thing that day that I saw that I gave even half a shit about. Honestly, when it comes to the canals in town, it still is.
As a late teenager it was always a straight choice between Exposure and the Foundry then after, Eddies or XL’s. But on sunny days. No question, The Flapper. One of your mate’s shitty bands playing? The Flapper. Getting ID’d everywhere? The Flapper will definitely serve you.
But it’s going. It’ll go down swinging. But it’s going. BCC owns the freehold so could still block it but Birmingham city, partly through lack of funding, but mostly due its own incompetence, is skint. Birmingham City Council is a beaten dog with no master, cowering at anyone wielding a big enough moneystick. So poor it had to reach into its chest and pull out its very heart and sell it to developers for pennies. I’ll never forgive them for the loss of Central Library. And if they can’t see the value of a world famous historically significant and loved landmark, what chance does a pub the arse end of town stand? It’s worth fighting though. Sign the petition, show your support. Even if it is to show the developer wrong who said “All those people who come to defend that pub are like someone who’s got an old banger parked outside their house, and starts screaming when it gets keyed”.
The developers, Whitehorse Estates Ltd, claim the resulting block of flats will be addressing the badly needed housing shortage by offering two bedroom apartments for “young families and first time buyers” but similar properties in the area go for around 200k. I’m wondering who these first time buyers are. Maybe they’re the ‘london professionals’ we hear about in that article that the broadsheets write now and again. My favourite quote in the above linked article is from the developers describing a three metre wall as a “forgotten space” and a “den of iniquity of drugs and prostitution”. A three metre wall.
He also downplays its musical significance, but how many small venues are there left in Birmingham city centre? Two? Three? You don’t get big bands without small bands, and you don’t get small bands if there’s nowhere to play. Here’s the thing – when you chase all the artists, weirdos, musicians, punks, freaks, goths, and kids away they don’t come back. And all the vibrancy and excitement that drew people here in the first place disappears with them. Then the city becomes a Wetherspoons version of a city, sure it has all the features of the thing it’s replacing and certainly isn’t short of people there pretending it is, but the atmosphere will only ever swing between boredom to desperation and nobody will ever be proud of being there.
The Flapper is worth saving. I’ll say that again. THE FLAPPER IS WORTH SAVING. Every time I come back to Birmingham it’s a little more sterile. Another ‘flagship’ store has opened and another place with character, history, or heart has gone. Culture grows in the cracks and soon they’ll be nowhere left. Birmingham will be just another theme park to Mammon, a heartless temple of glass and brushed aluminium indistinguishable from the next city.
So fuck you Capitalism, double fuck you the cowards at Birmingham City Council, and triple fuck you Whitehorse Estates Ltd.
I fucking curse this ground. I curse any ‘cheeky’ glass of wine on your balconies to taste of cheap beer left in the sun. I curse any nights sleep to be ruined by the ghosts of a thousand lost nights of noise and lights and friends. And I curse your view never to be as beautiful as a summer afternoon with friends in the sun but only of a bland sprawling metropolis of cookie cutter developments occupied by wankers.
And people of Birmingham now more than ever we’re standing in front of a tidal wave of conformity and indifference. Keep being weird, keep being kind, and keep being you.
These are dire times for Brutalism in Birmingham but the battle for the city’s soul isn’t over yet. Paradise Circus has already suggested six tactics we might employ in the effort to preserve our concrete heritage and now I’d like to suggest a few more:
Continue reading “How to keep Birmingham’s Brutalist Architecture: Nos. 7,8,9,10 and 11”
Hot on the heels of the news that another area of Birmingham will have its architectural significance airbrushed from history in order for it to be regenerated into another identikit mixed use development with a fucking Costa at the bottom, Paradise Circus presents a simple three step process to the Birmingham regeneration process.
Sure, the lollipop is an enduring design and represents cosy familiarity with the human/confectionery relationship — but its form creates a barrier to the free movement of flavour and satisfaction.
Continue reading “The Paradise Circus Cut-Out-and-Keep Guide to Regenerating Birmingham”
“I read book once,” says Mr Heslop — played by Brian Glover — in Porridge, “green it was.” And I’m fairly sure if the green book Mr Heslop had read was on architecture or morality then it was one more book than any of the people involved in the decision to demolish John Madin’s Birmingham Central Library have ever skimmed.
I’ve just read a book, called Library Story, by long time campaigner for the library Alan Clawley — which is nothing more than heartbreaking as it reveals how influence and patronage rips through the city, how the cosy collusion of the media — it’s a small town, after all — allows scrutiny to be sidelined. And it shows just how decisions are taken, and defended against logic.
What the book isn’t is a book about the building, or really about about the history of its use. It moves very quickly from construction and opening to the campaign to prevent demolition. But that campaign, doggedly and determinedly helmed by the author reveals more about decision making in Birmingham than anything the Kerslake Report has done, and more than a million council consultation events will ever do.
The demolition of Madin’s Library is victory for cliché and gormless ‘opinion’. A triumph of pluralistic ignorance, with the blood on the hands of an unimaginative fourth estate who sleepwalked with what passes for a second round these parts into an act of pointless vandalism.
Karl Marx developed a theory of what’s now called creative destruction: he postulated that capitalism needs continual cycles of devaluation or destruction in order to clear the ground for the creation of new wealth. As Stereolab explain, this is often by recession or war — but in our local context neglect and bogus ‘civic renewal’ serve the purpose. Capitalism has won over beauty, and the cheers of the braying classes as the thin exterior is punctured celebrate the powerlessness of all under money’s rule.
It is a war, a war for history and the public realm. The casualty of this war is beauty. The collateral damage the psyche and soul of the city.
Continue reading “Brutal, beautiful, battered: we’re losing the war for our soul”
A dark force is at work in industrial Birmingham. The evidence is there before us in our streets, in our museums, in the halls of power, our entertainment venues, our dark mills. Yes the devil himself pervades the fabric of Birmingham culture.
Nowhere is this presence felt more than in the imposing effigy in the main atrium to the Museum & Art Gallery in Chamberlain Square – the Civic focus of art and tradition in Birmingham. It is the first ambassador to welcome the casual visitor or tourist to the culture of Birmingham.
We build our identity in different ways on different days, according to the situation and the politics of the time. So it is that we might be white, brown or black but at times of crisis or joy we can become nations under one flag.
Kevin McCloud is many things. To some he is a southern imperialist, like a one man John Lewis, coming to Birmingham to tell us what we’re supposed to want. At other times he is other things. Thinking woman’s crumpet. Architectural commentator. A member of the London metropolitan media elite. The guy whose name fits wonderfully into the theme tune to Blankety Blank. Coat wearer of the year 1999-2005 (finally losing out to José Mourinho).
Today we say he is a Brummie. And a fucking good one.
For is it not the true mark of a Brummie TO BE NOT TOO FUCKING EASILY IMPRESSED WITH THINGS?
It’s how we make things better.
The latest Birmingham PLC press release — painstakingly recreated as news by the local paper — makes many proud boasts about the planned redevelopment of the Christopher Wray lighting factory. It includes the usual lauding of new shiny buildings and a shameless brag about how much the land has gone up in value since the owner bought up the previously undesirable site for cheap and banked it until HS2 was a dead cert.
But the thing that stood out for us was the claim that they’re going to make Brum’s first “ruin pub” — they’ve been ruining pubs all around town for years now, so how can this be a first?
There are actual ruins like the Fox & Grapes, just a few hundred yards from Christopher Wray, which is surely only one more stray match away from joining Island House in becoming a car park for new builds of Snow Hill. And then there are the more prosaically ruined pubs, like The Dog on Hagley Road which had its rabbit warren of snugs hollowed out to make a generic cavern to house an Ember Inn — the sort of pub ruin that is happening somewhere near you right now, no doubt.
And then there are the trendy pubs, of course, they’re the real ruins. But what should a real pub be like? We asked Andre De Orwell to describe his perfect watering hole..
Continue reading “The Ruin Under Water — our perfect Birmingham Pub”
This essay features as part of our 2015 Brutal calendar — which is free to download today, but will be half price if you wait until the New Year.
If you’ve ever seen a photo of Central Library architect John Madin you might notice that he always seems to be wearing a suit. I’m guessing that for a man in his profession in the ’50s and ’60s that isn’t too unusual. But somehow it seems too conventional for a man that produced such stark and, even now, startling buildings.
Ian Francis from 7 Inch Cinema once described to me in detail his concept for a TV show set in the architecture scene in Birmingham in the middle of the last century. It would have Madin in it, of course, but also Harry Weedon of Handsworth (the designer of many won- derful Art Deco Odeons and a number of huge car plants and fac- tories) and Jim Roberts of the Rotunda (and King’s Heath). They deserve commemorating. These were men at the top of their game and every bit as much of a part of the story of the British ’60s as anything to do with skirts or guitars.
They’re slowly being pulled down, not just the buildings but the men too. Roberts and his Rotunda survive, Madin doesn’t and neither soon will his masterpiece. We lose loads if we clone stamp them out of history.
In her novel The News Where You Are Catherine O’Flynn draws these parallels between the modern dismissal of the worth of unfashionable buildings and the lack of care paid to people who aren’t in some way useful to society. Birmingham City Council are having parts of their collective anatomy warmed as a warning by central government that they have failed the vulnerable, children especially. Their first announcements to deflect attention from this were focused on their decisions to not look after our vulnerable architectural heritage; or even the use of their toy-like descendants.
Those campaigning to save Central Library, or those miffed at the cavalier way that its destruction is not open for debate, may not realise that the Rotunda nearly suffered in the same way. It got the help it needed.
Colin Toth saved the Rotunda from demolition in 1991, and it eventually got listed and refurbished: the 21 storeys forced through a post-modernist 12 steps programme. Make it bright, they say, and it can stay.
I met James Roberts a few years ago at the launch of a book we were both featured in — 21 Stories, Nic Gaunt’s oral history of the building — and he was not only charming but charmed at the attention and love that his building has attracted. He also managed to tuck away quite a lot of the free wine. And he was wearing a suit. TV execs looking for a West Midlands answer to Mad Men, get on it.
Big buildings, big ideas, big building blocks. They were big men; and not just because they spent their days being photographed towering over model villages.
