Hi phil, I'd like to thank you for being the first to welcome me to the Birmingham Forum. You're right, it is a great site and I can see that people like yourself and all the other adult children that frequent it, make it so. All the Peter Pan's and Wendy's are a breath of fresh air.....
Anyway! The reason our city has needed to be reconstructed twice is because they got it wrong the last time. A lot of the blocks and social housing has been flattend because they were a disaster? Attwood Green is the latest prime example of the Phoenix?
The not so innovative Inner Ring Road or concrete coller, that they have started to dismantle, starting with Masshouse Circus, Moorstreet Queensway and St Martin's Circus, including the Bull Ring were taken down because they didn't work. They was all costly mistakes.
The amount of beautiful architecture that was lost to progress is incalculable. Did you know that Colmore Row was also to go with a road through the middle to link the concrete coller? I have seen the plans. But enough was enough at the time and it escaped by the skin of it's teeth. There would have been no city left. The concrete coller shrunk the size of Birmingham city centre and excluded everything outside of it, cut off the oxygen to it and it died a slow, painful death. The city centre became smaller?
The responsibility of all this lay with mainly just one man, The City Engineer, Herbert Manzoni. He was the driving force from the late 1950's and early 60's to push the concrete coller through, without any regard for the history, historic streetscapes and architecture that has been lost forever. His grand plan was to give the city over to the motorcar, now it's break the collar and expand the city for the pedestrian.
They have been filling in all the subways and taking down the coller because what went before doesn't work. His legacy is now being dismantled, but he dismantled our heritage that was by and large a beautiful Victorian city. Those custodians and Merchants and city forefathers, true lovers of Birmingham, the Louisa Anne Rylands of their world that went before, I read your article, and passed it on to the Herbert Manzonis and his ilk of our world, must be spinning in their graves......
Everything I said about The Bull Ring, The Bunker and and that other bunker, New St Station, is true, and what they replaced all the things in our city with was not an improvement and the same goes the second time round too.... They are not an improvement. Whatever happened to.... " If it ain't broke don't fix it..... " Anyway phil, let's lighten up.... It's only a bit of oul craic....