The many lives of the Bull Ring
From Middle Age merchants to viral cosmetics, Birmingham’s major shopping centre is having its latest glow-up
Dear Patchers — A big thank you to those of you who came to our first-ever Dispatch event on Thursday night! More than 40 of us just about managed to squeeze into the upstairs room at 1000 Trades in the JQ where we spent a very enjoyable couple of hours talking about the importance of local journalism, how to write a cracking story and, most importantly, the inside details of Alex Taylor’s recent visit to a Walsall sex club.
Welcome, also, to those of you who signed up to become paying members that day. I sent out a note to all readers, calling on those of you who hadn’t yet made the plunge from free subscriber to fully-fledged Dispatch nerd — we were just eight sign-ups away from reaching 1,000 patchers. I can now reveal the result of our latest count. Drumroll please…
We now have 1,015 members!
While we’re absolutely delighted to have hit this milestone, we won’t be stopping here. If you want to join us (and what better time to do so?) and help revive quality, long-form journalism in Birmingham and across the West Midlands, hit the button below.
Now, on with today’s story, which is about the Bullring. There is something of a long overdue buzz happening around the iconic shopping centre of late — after a string of high-profile openings (not least cosmetics brand Sephora, which brought overnight queues of excited shoppers). There’s a reason for that — the developer-owner has a big improvement strategy up its sleeve. After several years of post-pandemic slump, the Bullring certainly needs it. In today’s story, we consider the different guises the region’s commercial capital has undergone over the centuries, not least since it reopened in 2003 and ask, will the Bullring still be here in another 20 years?
Things to do
🎸 Missed out on Talking Heads playing with The Ramones at CBGB in the East Village in the 1970s? The second best thing? Catching the Scottish new wave and punk band The Skids at Birmingham’s The Crossing this Saturday. The Skids, formed in Dunfermline in 1977 hit the charts with their 1979 single ‘Into the Valley.’ After their 1970s and 1980s heyday, the band reformed in 2016 for a tour of the UK. They’ve been going strong since — making crowds wish they were old enough to have smoked cigarettes and looked moody with Lou Reed and Patti Smith. Tickets start at £30.25. The venue opens at 7 pm.
🕯️ Go see the Jaivant Patel Company dancers perform for Diwali at the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) this Saturday. The show will contain dancing from many genres including Bollywood, Kathak, Bharatanatyam, Bhangara and Dandiya Raas. Doors at 7:30 pm. Tickets from 10.75.
🎤 From watching reruns of Steptoe and Son to soul super-stardom: Rag ‘n’ Bone Man is performing at the o2 Academy Birmingham this Sunday. Rag ‘n’ Bone Man, otherwise known as Rory Charles Graham, produces baritone neo-soul infused with personal lyricism — trust us: you’ll recognise this tune. Doors at 7 pm. Tickets start at £46.
⌛ Also at the MAC, go watch the Midland’s premier of Timestalker, including a Q&A session with the writer-director and star actress Alice Lowe this Sunday. Coventry-born Lowe — of cult comedy Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace — follows up on her 2016 directorial debut Prevenge with Timestalker an absurd comedy about a time-travelling ‘situationship’. Tickets from £10.75. Doors at 2:00 pm.
🎄One for the diary: Ikon Gallery’s Winter Craft Market will return on Wednesday 4th December. Shop for unique gifts from more than 40 stalls of locally made goods like jewellery, homeware, cards and more. Plus, sweet snacks from the likes of Brownie Che and Brummie Honey. Entry is free from 5.30-8.30 pm.
The many lives of the Bull Ring
By Kate Knowles
If you stand in between the two sections of the Bullring Shopping Centre and look down towards the markets, the view is largely the same as it was two centuries ago. St Martin’s Church sits at the bottom, its tall spire reaching into the sky, Nelson gazing down at it from his buoyant plinth further up the hill. Were he still alive today, he might have cast his eyes out with pride last week as Sephora, the internationally famous cosmetics brand, finally found a Birmingham home.
On Wednesday morning hundreds of shoppers waited in the cold, eager to be among the first to enter the new branch. Some queued overnight, others brought camping chairs. One woman told the BBC she’d come from Hereford because she wanted to surprise her daughter with a goody bag. The shop was officially opened at 9.30 am, when the funereal, giant black drapes were removed, revealing the monolithic white storefront — the largest in Europe — underneath.
It’s a big week in a big year for the Bullring. On Thursday, Spanish fast fashion giant Zara opened two new shops inside the shopping centre, joining the recently reopened River Island and new arrival Marks and Spencer. Several slump years, exacerbated by the pandemic, meant empty units had become a common sight. Especially ominous was the closure of four-storey Debenhams in 2021 and pre-pandemic high street stalwart Topshop in 2020. Both had left gaping holes in the building’s 1.5 million square feet of retail space.
We all know the story by now: the rise of the Amazon warehouse, the fall of the department store, the final body blow of the pandemic, the one-time king of UK retail Phillip Green sheepishly bobbing around Port Hercules on a superyacht, his Arcadia empire reduced to rubble and mass redundancies. Now, just as with the high street, the writing is said to be on the wall for the mall. Well, that’s unless you ask Hammerson, who have set their sights on giving the Bull Ring a glow-up.
In 2023, Hammerson — who also own Grand Central and Martineau Galleries — set out to improve its city centre estates. But whereas many of the country’s tired old shopping centres haven’t had a facelift since they popped up last century, it’s just 20 years since the Bullring reopened to great fanfare after a big redevelopment. At that time, the city’s leader Albert Bore called the new Bullring the “largest and most vital piece of the jigsaw in this city’s continuing renaissance,” which suggests he expected it to be around for a good sight longer.
Now, just two decades on, the Bullring needs another facelift. Certainly, there are naysayers — those who think the shopping centre’s days are numbered. But if history tells us anything, the Bullring is a survivor, and its story takes us back many years, to medieval times. In 1154, long before crowds gathered outside Sephora, eager for cocoa butter lip balms and cellular water antioxidant face mists, Peter de Bermingham, a local landowner, obtained a Charter of Marketing Rights from King Henry II and started trading textiles on this very spot. It took about 100 years for a major cloth trade to have been established. It took another 760 years after that for Sephora to arrive.
In the intervening years, it’s lived lives as a corn market (part of which was used for bull-baiting, where a bull would be tethered to a post and set upon by a dog as sport, and providing the area with its distinctive name), a location for festive fairs, a market that survives to this day and popular gathering spot for working-class protesters in the 1830s and 1840s.
The original Bull Ring (in the form of an actual shopping centre as opposed to Peter de Bermingham’s textile stall) was Europe’s first-ever indoor shopping centre when it opened in the 1960s. It set the blueprint for similar developments up and down the country, such as Eastgate in Essex and Meadowhall in Sheffield. More significantly, for the people of Birmingham at least, the improvements came alongside large-scale house building and the construction of an inner city ring road that together symbolised the dawning of a modern era following the drab post-war years. “Well there seems to be nothing wrong with the virility of civic government if it can bring about a development such as this,” Prince Phillip told the crowds after he cut the ribbon when he officially opened the centre on 29 May 1964.
Fast forward another 20 years and the shopping centre was already outdated. The brutalist building was increasingly dilapidated and the dwindling numbers of shops faced competition from other, out-of-town malls. If it wanted to survive, it would have to reinvent itself once again.
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