Farclose House, Springbank Road - Awaiting Demoliton 18/10/06

The City of Birmingham has a great time-honoured tradition of replacing substandard housing with soon-to-become substandard housing – see the results of  inner-City slum clearance around Aston, Newtown and Nechells for prime examples - and where once we had great swathes of the City cleansed of their private hovels to be replaced by the wonders of municipal housing, the reverse process is now at full force with Council housing stock being swept away to make way for largely ’social housing’ (Housing Associations in old money) and the buzzword of urban regeneration –  ’mixed use’ developments.

Farclose House seen above in October 2006 on the corner of Springbank Road and Cambridge Crescent awaiting ‘dynamite demolition’ was built in 1967 as part of the Woodview Estate in Edgbaston – a 13 floor high-rise, symbolic of not only 1960s Birmingham but of the inadequacies of housing construction and planning myopia in the late 1950s and 1960s.

The Woodview Estate has now largely been levelled as part of the sprawling Attwood Green redevelopment project that has encompassed the Lee Bank, Benmore and Woodview estates and – in the  main – levelled them.  The estates themselves were sprawling Council developments comprising mixed storey developments from high-rise tower blocks to maisonettes, houses and bungalows.

The estates grew-up in the 1960s hemmed in by the previously – and to some extent still – affluent residential Edgbaston, the industrial outcrop around Broad Street and the A38.  The realisation that they had, by the 1970s, deteriorated into high-crime ’slum’ areas finally led to the realisation that drastic action was required and the £100+ million Attwood Green project begun. The usual beneficiaries of Council estate redevelopment – Mercian Housing – are joined by Optima Community Association and Crest Nicholson in the project which aims to create over 900 homes and shops etc etc . . .

Whether the new estate will stand the tests of time – or deteriorate as quickly as the previous ones – remains to be seen!

Birmingham Museum of Science and Industry site

One of  the single greatest losses to the heritage of Birmingham occurred in 1997 when Birmingham City Council closed the Museum of Science and Industry which occupied part of the former Elkington Silver Electroplating Works in Newhall Street and had operated since 1951.

The Museum was a fascinating Aladdin’s Cave of industrial heritage exhibits crammed into a very unsuitable building for such a function – lots of tiny rooms on different levels – which made it all the more exciting to explore! Immediately inside the entrance you were presented with a rather grotty ‘cafe’ area along the right-hand side and then, to the left, 6235 LMS Coronation Class 4-6-2 loco ‘City of Birmingham’ which used to shuffle electronically along backwards and forwards a yard or so on the hour:  sounds naff but was very impressive as a child – particularly the scale of the engine.

As you moved along the walkway past the loco and cafe you had an Otis lift gear display infront of you – when you pressed a button the machinery whirred into action and the many hours of laughter I had as a child at the phrase ‘governor balls’ you wouldn’t begin to imagine! To the left of that I seem to recall an old open-sided Birmingham City Council dustbin lorry and an old steam engine named ‘Secundus’ that I think had blown it’s boiler working in a quarry or some such in Dorset . . . the ‘Birmingham’ connection being it was built by Bellis & Seekings in 1874.

To the end of the room and through a small doorway and you were into a more labyrinthine part of the museum with vintage cars, aircraft parts, the last tram to run in Birmingham along with sound (when a button was pressed, of course) and – one of my personal favourites – ten to 15 radios dating back some 100 years or so with a little control panel.  A tune would be playing and by pressing a series of buttons, the tune would switch to playing through the corresponding radio so you could hear the differences in sound quality over the years . . . an excellent piece of kit.

I must have spent a day or two every holiday mooching around inside the Museum and knew every exhibit inside out (the sands of time, however, have gradually eroded this knowledge, sadly).

As mentioned elsewhere, I left Birmingham for many years and when I returned at the close of the 1990s the Museum of Science and Industry was no more – closed for good and a new pretender to the name was emerging on Curzon Street to be opened as ThinkTank in 2001, part of the Millennium Point development.  Sadly, whilst a few of the exhibits had made the move, many were simply moved to Birmingham City Council’s Museum Collections Centre in Dollman Street which opens sporadically to small public viewings.

As if this wasn’t a poor enough state of affairs, with the Museum now vacated from the Elkington building the Council deemed the structure “surplus to requirements and [it] was marketed for disposal” whereby the Council began hawking the site around to potential developers.

St Bernanrd’s Property took the project on in 2002 and the accepted plans are now to provide “mixed use development including leisure and commercial uses and 234 apartments” including “the retention and sensitive refurbishment of a number of Listed Buildings on the site, some of which formed part of the former Elkington Plating Works”. So, we lose a fascinating record of the City’s industrial heritage for more ‘mixed use’ nonsense – many similar projects are standing half empty around the City already – but ’some’ of the former works will be saved . . . surely more of it would have been had they left it as it was?  Furthermore, take a look at the photographs below to see how many buildings have been retained at the site during the preparation for the Newhall Square development.  Whilst the frontage buildings shown above are retained, where the gates now stand a large glass-fronted section housing the City of Birmingham loco lay which, along with the majority of the buildings, is no more -  the majority of the Museum structures having now gone.

The demolition and clearance workd at the Museum site began in October 2006 and is now virtually complete as can be seen below.  ThinkTank has been up and running for 8 years now as a fee-paying sideshow for those with an attention span of a goldfish containing ‘interactive exhibits’ of the kind of which my 6 year-old would tire within seconds . . . hardly a replacement in any way, shape or form for the splendid Museum of Science and Industry.  Furthermore, it is a ‘Science’ museum . . . no mention of ‘Industry’ so hardly a replacement for what has been lost and at £9.00 a throw to get in hardly serving the people of Birmingham in quite the manner they once were!

The complete lack of Birmingham City Council’s investment and interest in promoting a knowledge of the City’s past has been highlighted elsewhere but for the City of a Thousand Trades to not have a dedicated – and adult – Museum of Science and Industry is something of an embarrassment.  Jon Price at Made in Birmingham has fought a tireless campaign to get the Council to reconsider its options regarding a museum and the fact that a large proportion of the old museum’s exhibits are not available for viewing by us, the public, who surely own them as Council Tax payers but to no avail: pop over to Jon’s site for more details.

Birmingham City Council – you should be ashamed of yourselves!

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.

BBC Pebble Mill - Pebble Mill Road, Edgbaston 14/08/05

The BBC’s Pebble Mill complex opened in 1971 on a 6 acre site and was the hub of regional programming – including the popular Pebble Mill at 1 show which ran from 1973 to 1986 along with regional news programmes and Gardening Today for which the BBC also ‘annexed’ part of Kings Heath Park.

However, as with the majority of 1960/70s constructions, they were far from structurally perfect and Pebble Mill suffered from more than its fair share of flaws. In addition to this, the shift in programming from cosy studio sets to outside/mobile broadcasting left the need for the vast studio complex shrinking coupled with advances in IT meaning most of the work of the BBC in the region could be accomplished in a much smaller, high-tech environment.

In 2004, the inevitable happened and the BBC announced it would be moving to new premises at the Mailbox in the City Centre. Advantage West Midlands, the Regional Development Agency, acquired the site from the BBC and promptly set about demolishing and clearing the site to make way for a technology and science park . . . which has yet to be fully realised.

Not one of the more aesthetically pleasing structures in the region, it was nevertheless a landmark structure and, through its connection with television and radio, one of the most famous.

Birmingham Battery & Metal Co - Selly Oak

The Birmingham Battery & Metal Co opened a new rolling mill in Selly Oak in 1871 to equip them for their new venture into rolling and tube production. Incidentally, to dispel a popularly held local misconception, the company did not make ‘batteries’: ‘battery’ was a term for hammering, or battering, ingots of metal into various shapes for the production of various products – pans and kettles, for example.

The Selly Oak site rapidly grew and added a copper refinery, tube mill, rolling mill and canal wharf on the Dudley Canal (now drained and filled) at its junction with the Worcester & Birmingham Canal. The firm enjoyed a boom period supplying railways with stay rods for boilers, amongst other products, and expanding to the point where a coal-fired gas production plant was built to power the machinery and its own power station!

However, as did many of the heavy industries, the company fell into difficulty during the 1980s and closed down leaving a large site prime for redevelopment but heavily contaminated. In its heyday the site was considerable but proposals for residential development were rebuffed due to the land contamination and instead, part of the site was turned into Battery Park – a retail development – and a large Sainsbury’s store.

Futher development of the area is underway with the future of the remaining factory structure looking seriously grim if the following consultation document is anything to go by:

It would appear that what is now proposed is a renavigating of the Dudley Canal – which had been drained and filled, remnants of which can be clearly seen on Harborne Lane – and the construction of a 54-acre retail and residential site and a new, bigger Sainsburys on the site of the remaining Company building.

I have to say I think the remaining Company office building is fantastic and defintiely aesthetically pleasing in a rather gothic manner and I, for one, will be sorry to see it go if it does get swept away:  the road building and bypass scheme – although well-advanced – has not brought about the demise of the building on Bristol Road as yet but I feel it’s more a matter of ‘when’ than an ‘if’.

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.

Mitchell's and Butler's Cape Hill Brewery

Opening in 1881, Henry Mitchell took over his father’s pub, the Crown Inn in Smethwick, and, as did a large number of landlords during the period, set about constructing a small brewery adjoining the premises. In 1877, Mitchell began constructing the Cape Hill brewery which was completed in 1879 and became a joint venture with prominent local brewer William Butler in 1898 with a merging of their respective companies to form Mitchel’s and Butler’s.

The brewery went from strength to strength acquiring a large number of pubs, hotels and other breweries. Merging with Bass in 1961, the company had operated around 4,000 pubs and with its merger with Charrington United in 1969, inherited a further 5,000. The brewery enjoyed its own internal railway, linked to the long-gone Harborne Railway (read more on the brewery’s railway on the sister site Rail Around Birmingham HERE), had extensive stabling for its horse-drawn delivery duties, a thriving social club, cricket and bowling teams and had entertained such showbiz luminaries as Laurel & Hardy over the years!

However, legislation during the 1980s limited the number of pubs breweries could own leading to a mass sell-off of properties and unsuccessful foreign outings and a failed take over of Carlsberg-Tetley spelt a downturn for the company resulting in the selling-off of its brewing arm to Belgium Interbrew Group. The final takeover was by American giants Coors who, within a matter of months from taking over, announced that the brewery would be closing on December 6th 2002. As of my visit in March 2005, the site demolition was well underway and Persimmon Homes had obtained permission from Sandwell Council to build 650 new homes on the site.

Dismantling the overhead conveyor system 05/08/06

One of the more shocking elements of the demise of Longbridge, social and econimic consequences aside, was the changes it bought about to the landscape of the southern tip of Birmingham.  Views that I had known all my life had suddenly, and drastically, changed.  For visitors to the City approaching from the South along the A38, one of the most striking changes was the removal of the overhead conveyor system that had provided a ‘gateway to Birmingham’ from a southern approach for 30 years.

Whilst it can be argued that industrial landscapes are an eyesore etc . . . they are very much, or at least were, integral to the landscape of Birmingham and its surrounding regions so to lose 400 acres of such industrial heritage in one fell swoop has had a considerable impact on the region.

Below are a series of images covering largely the demolition of the West Works and the removal of the overhead conveyor bridge (which was no mean feat) during the period 04/08/06 – 04/11/06: