Tag: 103

#365daysofbiking Things that happen when you’re not looking

February 14th – I haven’t been to Birmingham much this winter, and the first time passing though overground since Christmas in daylight made me stop in surprise at a building growing in the Colmore Row business area.

This office block has grown on the site of John Madin’s now demolished brutalist gem 103 Colmore Row: The former Birmingham Natwest Tower.

103 had passed its time and it is right, I guess that it has gone and change is happening. But I do miss it, it was a startlingly beautiful bit of brutalist design – a priapic monument to mammon.

The building replacing it is so far unknown to me: But it seems huge. In my head 103 fitted perfectly, in a forest of towers, but it clearly never was so, and the rising of a replacement is somehow shocking in size and imposition.

This is what change looks like. I’ll be interested to see this develop.

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March 3rd – Birmingham, late afternoon. I’d finished for the day and needed to get a few errands done, and while I was about it, check out the slow death of Birmingham’s affair with architectural Brutalism.

This grey, colourless day was the perfect day to survey the wounds being inflicted on the skyline by the cranes, breakers and cutters currently removing Madin’s Central Library and 103, Colmore Row. The demolitions are fascinating, dramatic, conflicting. On the side of the library, soon to disappear, the mural proclaims ‘Todos eat posible’ – all is possible. Survival for that mural isn’t, but change is a certainty.

Until dusk, colour only existed in bright demolition machinery and the hi-vis of the wonderfully nonchalant crane driver; but dusk brought the lights and glimpses of the other Birmingham.

I don’t know what I feel. Uneasy probably applies best.