Birmingham Skin Hospital - John Bright Street

Opened in 1888 – following transfer of facilities from Newhall Street which began operating in 1881 – the Birmingham and Midland Hospital for Skin and Urinary Diseases operated from its John Bright Street base for nearly 100 years before its work was transferred to George Road Edgbaston and is now part of the Dudley Road ‘City’ Hospital group.

The hospital, as the name suggests, concerned itself with all manner of skin ailments and diseases and operated both an in and out-patient department from the site which was purpose built to house the hospital for the princely sum of £5,000!

Interestingly, the entrance for woman and children was via John Bright Street – as seen above – whilst the entrance for male patients was via the rear of the building on Beak Street (see below) – presumably to save them the embarrassment of being seen entering through the main entrance by women and children due to the moral incorrigibility of more ‘urinary’ related issues!  For in-patients, the ward originally held 21 beds and there wee also medicated bathing facilities to be found in the basement of the building.

With the move to consolidate specialisms within large, multi-disciplinary hospitals – and due to the building itself not being suitable for the modern hospital – closure came during the early 1980s and the building lay derelict for several years.

Whilst working at Edward’s Number 8 nightclub, which adjoined the hospital, in the late-1980s the building was acquired by either Edward Fewtrell or Ansell’s Leisure shortly after their takeover (I can’t precisely recall) and we had keys to the building as it was being used to store a few bits and pieces from the nightclubs and bars.  Naturally, we spent many hours exploring the old hospital which was left in remarkably good condition inside with a lot of fittings and furniture still in place, along with signage etc.

Our greatest find – whilst mooching around in  the dark in the basement area – was a wooden hand cart that was shaped like a coffin:  no idea how old that was as I presume it had been ‘retired’ to the basement many years prior to the hospitals closure . . . at least one would hope so!

Some time later the building was opened as The Hospital – another bar in the by-then rapidly declining John Bright Street bar/club area, killed-off by competition from Broad Street, pedestrianisation and the moving of major bus termini to more central points in the City – which ran for a relatively short period before closure.

Whilst apparently not a listed structure, it is still standing and, externally at least, in pristine condition as the photographs here show.  I am unaware as to any function served by the building itself and assume it is vacant as no external signage indicates otherwise but sitting,a s it does, in one of the City’s development areas I would posit its conversion to offices imminent.

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.

Staple Lodge Road - Wychall Farm, Kings Norton 14/07/06

The Wychall Farm development seen above is phase II of a £40m regeneration project replacing 500 council properties – a mixture of high-rise blocks (demolished in phase I) and Smiths houses, as seen here. The houses, some of which have had to be repurchased by the Council as they had been bought by the residents, are to be replaced with 350 Housing Association homes developed by Bromford Corinthia.

Although most of the homes are now derelict and demolition is well underway, it is intersting to note, as we look around the estate, that some of the homes are still occupied.

Holloway near Caban Close - Ley Hill, Northfield 07/06/06

The Lay Hill Regeneration Scheme, begun in 2000, is another prime example of the gradual erosion of Council housing in favour of Housing Associations. Whilst, in the long-term, this saves the cost of repairs for the Council it also, in this case at any rate, removes 750 sub-standard constructed houses built by Wimpey in the 1950s in favour of 450 of what will hopefully be superior properties: that is the theory!

The ethos appears to be ‘building homes to last’ however, for anyone who has viewed the construction process, peg boarding and a plethora of wooden framing does not instill confidence as to their longevity: only time will tell. The usual suspects are involved in the housing schemes – Focus et al – and below is a selection of photographs of the site which depict what was there and what is being built.