It’s the hit Westside building which kickstarted the wholesale reconstruction of Britain’s Second City ten years ago.
And in the decade since Malala Yousafzai opened the £188 million Library of Birmingham on 3 September 2013, the area has seen more TEN major changes.
Watch our video here or pop up to the fourth floor terrace and seventh floor Secret Garden to spot them for yourself, alongside worker bees searching for fresh, “high altitude” city centre pollen!
1. Central Library demolished: the 39-year-old “upside down ziggurat” closed on 29 June 2013, two months before the Library of Birmingham opened on 3 September. Work to demolish John Madin’s Brutalist masterpiece finally began on 14 December 2015.
2. Rotunda disappears: in the new library’s early years, front terrace visitors could see as far as the Rotunda towering above the Bullring. But One Centenary Way, the largest new building in Paradise, has recently blocked that iconic view. Ooops!
3. Octagon appears: from floor seven in the Secret Garden, visitors can currently watch more Paradise work to build the £110 million Octagon, the city’s tallest tower-to-be. From 2025, the 49-storey, 509-foot tall building will house 370 build-to-rent apartments – and top the 1960s BT Tower. Down below, the city council’s former 610-space Paradise multi-storey car park will give way to a Court Collaboration 46-storey tower.
4. Centenary Square rebuilt – again! The modern square was opened by the then Labour city council leader Sir Dick Knowles on 9 June 1991. A redesign began in April 2017 but work took two years and costs soared 50 per cent to £15.5 million. The then still-unfinished square was officially reopened on 3 July 2019 with more garden areas, a giant reflective pool with dancing fountains and dozens of giant lampposts to illuminate the area at night.
5. Symphony Hall foyer redesigned: the ICC and Symphony Hall were opened by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on 12 June 1991. The company now running Symphony Hall demolished its original glass frontage in 2019. The new £13 million “Making an Entrance” foyer opened in July 2021 with mezzanine-level panoramic views of Centenary Square which was then finally fully completed in time for the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games last summer.
6. Trams at the double: work to extend the West Midlands Metro tramline from Grand Central began in 2017. Trams first reached the Phase One Centenary Square stop on 11 December 11 2019. Westside Phase Two, from Centenary Square to 54 Hagley Road / Edgbaston Village, opened seven months behind schedule on 17 July 2022.
Phase One is 0.4 miles long from Grand Central to Centenary Square and cost £65.98 million. Phase Two cost a further £83.4 million for 0.8 miles of track. The total cost of the 1.2 mile Grand Central to Edgbaston Village line was £149 million, roughly £77,000 per metre. Today, silver-blue trams serve Wolverhampton and West Bromwich, giving Black Country folks easy access to a great weekend or night out in Broad Street and/or Brindleyplace.
7. The NIA repeatedly renamed: the 1991 stadium became the Barclaycard Arena in December, 2014 – just two months after Malala became the youngest Nobel Prize winner. Rebranded as Arena Birmingham in September 2017, it became the 15,800 capacity Utilita Arena on 15 April 2020 – almost two years after the new Legoland Discovery Centre had opened alongside in July 2018.
On 17 February, 2023, a new £1.7 million indoor Mondo athletics track was unveiled to host indoor Grand Prix and UK Athletics Championships until at least 2032.
8. Arena Central rises: now best seen from the fourth floor terrace, several new buildings form part of the unfinished Arena Central development including HSBC UK HQ, opened in November 2018.
9. Municipal Bank reinvented: the University of Birmingham reopened the former Municipal Bank (1933) as ‘The Exchange’ in September 2021. Previously unused for most of this century, it is now the public face of the Edgbaston campus university – the country’s first civic university where “students from all backgrounds were accepted on equal basis”.
10. The boys are back in town! the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Birmingham Rep, Hall of Memory and Baskerville House have changed little since the Library of Birmingham opened, but there’s one more significant change.
Previously outside of the now long-demolished Register Office, the “Golden Boys” statue of Matthew Boulton, James Watt and William Murdoch went into storage on 23 August 2017. It was reinstalled on the Broad Street / Symphony Hall corner of Centenary Square on 29 April 2022 and, like the entire Westside BID area, the statue promises a rich, golden future for the city at large.
ENDS
