Alan Clawley describes the ongoing development of one of the city’s busiest junctions.
Once touted as the premier office location outside the congested city centre, Five Ways is being transformed as an adjunct of the cultural tourism honeypot of Westside. And it’s happening largely without the large-scale demolition that saw off the Edgbaston Shopping Centre and its replacement by a Morrisons supermarket.
Almost without our noticing, developers have bought up buildings that have fallen empty and rather than knock them down, they have begun to adapt them to new uses. The former Childrens’ Hospital, was somewhat incongruously converted into a casino. Next to it, the post-modern block originally built as apartments but today, the poster that proclaimed, “last remaining unit for sale” for several years has been replaced with a sign advertising the building as Birmingham Central – Broadway Plaza Travelodge.
The nineteenth century Grade 2-listed Lench’s Trust almshouses that cower under the shadow of Madin’s Number 1 Hagley Road have long since been vacated by the poor and elderly beneficiaries of the ancient charity. The cottages were sold en bloc, re-named Garden Court and marketed for first-time buyers or people looking for an investment property. A recently refurbished one-bedroom ground floor flat in the “beautiful courtyard setting”, has just sold for £95,000. And the new occupiers will be within easy walking distance of the city centre.
One Hagley Road was opened as Metropolitan House in 1974. Madin considered it to be his finest office block and much better that the austere 1960s Hagley House (now Cobalt Square) and Lyndon House that still grace the Hagley Road today. I prefer their elegant simplicity to post-modern beakiness. The developers, SevenCapital, who bought Number One clearly like its unusual shape and plan to convert the interior from offices to luxury apartments
On the opposite side of the roundabout the 1960s Auchinleck House was once the headquarters of the city council’s Parks Department, known affectionately by summer play scheme organisers as ‘Rec and Com’. The council staff and their private sector successors have long since gone. The original mural on the end wall was covered over by a Bruce Maclean mural in 2000, but today the entire building is sheathed in scaffolding and giant floodlit posters advertising skin cream. It seems that there is still a strong enough demand for hotel rooms in this part of the city to justify the cost of installing hundreds of mass-produced bathroom pods and re-cladding the entire facade.
In the middle of the recently demolished Auchinleck Square once stood a rather stiff statue of the great Second World War soldier, Field Marshal Sir Claude John Eyre Auchinleck, otherwise known as ‘the Auk’. His work in the Middle East gets mixed reviews these days, so it will be interesting to see whether the new owners will continue to honour the old man when they re-brand the complex as they surely will.
Just off Five Ways, in George Road, stands the grand architectural ruin of Five Ways Tower. Designed by the now defunct government architects’ department as recently as 1979, it was diagnosed as suffering from an incurable ‘sick building syndrome’ and has been empty and unloved for many years. Surely some expert can find a cure for its affliction and thereby encourage a developer to rescue this fine building from an ignominious slow death.
