ThinkTank - Eastside, City Centre/Aston 26/05/06

The Eastside development is a phased regeneration project aimed at revitalising a 420 acre tract of land immediately to the East of the City Centre, largely encompassed within a triangle formed by Curzon Street, Lawley Middleway and Jennens Lane at a cost of £6bn.

One of the first signs of the development, Millennium Point on Curzon Street which opened in 2001 and houses the Birmingham Science Museum amongst its ‘ThinkTank’ facilities, can be seen above. What is also interesting here is the great contrast between the old and the new: to the left of the shot is a derelict workshop on Grosvenor Street which sits quite uncomfortably next to the ’space age’ stylings of Millennium Point.

The proposed redevelopment encompasses the old favourites of offices, bars & restaurants, open spaces/parks and ‘innovative centres of technology’, city apartments etc . . . Now, not wanting to appear at all curmudgeonly or standing in the way of ‘progress’ but there does seem to be an awful lot of the above list already in Birmingham, a fair proportion of it vacant, and the laudible outpourings of the Council that they are developing an ‘area of inclusion for local people . . . benefiting the local community etc . . .’ can be viewed with a more sceptical eye: the extent to which Brindley Place apartments, the shops of the Mailbox, and the million and one bars on Broad Street have benefited the people of Ladywood and its surroundings being a moot point.

However, that aside, the area once provided for a fascinating walk as it was an industrial ghost town with all the roads lined with a variety of Victorian industrial premises (and some more recent), which had been the subject of a mass compulsory purchase order and were all ‘Acquired by Advantage West Midlands’ – the Regional Development Agency.  To attest to that point I have posted a selection of photographs of the area below taken in 2006.

HP Sauce factory, Aston

Another example of a British institution being sold to a company from abroad and later to be closed is the stalwart of the British breakfast table, HP Sauce of Aston.

The recipe for HP brown sauce was bought from its creator, Nottingham grocer Frederick Gibson Garton, by Edward Samson Moore, owner of the Midland Vinegar Company in 1903. The plant originally brewed its own vinegar for production of the sauce and when the A38 Aston Expressway bisected the site, a pipe was mounted over the Expressway to pump vinegar from one side of the works (The Top Yard – which has long-since closed) to the other!

Danone bought HP Foods for £199 million from industrial conglomerate Hanson in 1988 but, for various reasons connected with other areas of the Danone empire, announced in March 2005 that it was seeking a buyer. In stepped Heinz with a £470 succesful bid who then announced, a year later, their plan to shift production to Elste in the Netherlands! For once, a flourishing business with annual after-tax profits of around £31 million faced closure with the loss of around 120 of its existing workforce (which had already been gradually eroded over the previous few years).

Sadly, the production shifted from the site with closure coming in March 2007, closely followed by complete demolition of the factory itself:  yet another industrial staple of Birmingham – and landmark, particularly the tower as seen in the photograph above – gone from the City for good.