Tag: John Madin

#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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September 30th – Right now, Birmingham is doing what it does best – changing. I was in Birmingham for a sunny, pleasant afternoon that felt like the last of summer, and I continued my fascination with the demolition of the library, 103 Colmore Row and the Birmingham Conservatoire. The Adrian Boult Hall is now gone, the library down to it’s last scraps, and 103 Colmore Row is forlorn and truncated, much like the memory of the architect who designed all of them, the great John Madin.

There’s no time for sentiment, because Brum so doesn’t do that; the engineers are driving forward the change in their machines, cutting, smashing and pulverising the modernism to dust. And it’s fascinating, from the jurassic appearance of a resting concrete cutter to the antics of a pair of experts in a cradle slung above the devastation like some hi-visibility acetylene and helmet circus act.

It’s stunning, shocking and wonderful to watch. But I’m glad Madin himself didn’t live to see the crushing of his big civil dream.