The McDonald's ramp that was an architectural jewel

Dear readers — ‘The ramp’ on New Street has achieved cult status in Birmingham. A well known meeting spot for frazzled shoppers, mooching teenagers, and just about anyone in need of an easy-to-spot landmark, this unremarkable walkway has made its way into the local, collective imagination. It is affectionately printed on posters, postcards, and postmodern tea towels, a tribute to one of the everyday quirks of life in the second city.

But what about its past lives? In today’s story, regular history writer Jon Neale takes us back in time to the grand old days when an architectural jewel stood in place of the ramp we know and love today. The evolution of this iconic spot tells a story about Birmingham’s obsession with demolishing and rebuilding its past. But before that, your Brum in Brief.

Brum in Brief

❓ We’ve been doing some more digging into Councillor Akhlaq Ahmed, the Labour member for Hall Green North who has a reputation for absenteeism. To jog your memory, Councillor Ahmed has a rather poor attendance record having attended only about half the number of council meetings expected of him since he was elected three years ago. Residents also reported that he has a habit of ignoring emails and casework. It turns out, he hasn’t been much better at making it to his own, monthly advice surgeries for residents. When The Dispatch popped to Tyseley Community Centre in early December (according to the council website, Ahmed hosts his surgery there on the first Friday of every month) he was nowhere to be seen. A private event was underway and the person running it had no idea who Ahmed was. When we called Ahmed to check, he hung up on us before we could get an answer. When we rang the community centre a few days later, the manager checked their records and confirmed Councillor Ahmed hasn’t held a surgery there for five months. 

But that’s not all: we aren’t sure Ahmed is even living in Birmingham permanently, despite the fact that Labour has chosen him to stand in next year’s local elections here. Our investigations show that Councillor Ahmed is linked to three properties: a commercial property each in London and Birmingham, and a house in Tysley which is owned by his wife Tehseen. It’s this address where Ahmed is listed on the electoral register. But when we paid a visit two weeks ago, it wasn’t Ahmed or a member of his family who answered the door, but a young man who didn’t recognise Ahmed’s name. This tenant told us it was a “shared house” that had been rented out for about a year. So where does Councillor Ahmed actually live? The Dispatch understands that he has confirmed to Labour West Midlands that his primary address is in Birmingham and the party has seen no evidence to suggest otherwise. However, all the evidence The Dispatch has gathered tells a different story. Do you know where Councillor Ahmed lives? Is your local councillor hard to reach? Get in touch: editor@birminghamdispatch.co.uk

🚮 A striking bin worker has become the first lorry driver to lose his job since the long-running refuse dispute with Birmingham City Council began. George Wilson says he refused to accept a £7,000 pay cut and must now scale back his family’s Christmas plans. The 60-year-old had been in the full-time role since 2015 and had expected to retire from it: “I would have carried on until I was 67,” he said. “I didn’t want to leave. It was a really good job.” The council, however, said all drivers were offered a variety of options including retraining and voluntary redundancy. ‘Three individuals refused to engage with this process and as a result were subject to compulsory redundancy,’ a spokesperson said. (ITV).

💼 A woman is calling for records of people who grew up in care to be handled more sensitively. Nine years ago, a social worker handed 50-year-old Jackie McCartney “an old battered brown box” containing all the details from her childhood. (BBC).

Arriving at New Street Station in the mid-1930s provided a very different experience to today. The noise of steam engines and the scent of smoke in the air was inescapable — but there was also a genuine sense of grandeur to the surroundings.

Looking up, you would see a vast expanse of glass — the largest single-span glass roof in the world at the time of opening in 1851. It was as long as two-and-a-half football pitches and 15 feet higher than the Town Hall. That much was to be expected given its maker, Fox, Henderson & Co, had been responsible for constructing London’s world famous Crystal Palace.

Exiting via the main route out onto Stephenson Street, the splendour was sustained at the front, where the six storey, Italian-style Queen’s Hotel which was designed by William Livock and built in 1854, joined up with the station.

A time traveller from today would recognise the elegant Midland Bank HQ opposite – now the Apple Store – as well as Piccadilly Circus and the buildings opposite on Corporation Street. But the most jarring difference would be just to the right. In the place of the beloved ‘ramp’, there was one of the city’s grandest gothic revival edifices – the Exchange.

Its name came from its role as the central commodity exchange for the West Midlands metal industries, although this was just one of its functions. This six-storey building had a cavernous 23-foot ground floor and measured over 180 feet from the base on Stephenson Place to the tower at its top, almost twice as high as the Council House dome. But as the ground rose steeply to New Street, the frontage there was more modest. Inside, there was a large hall and an assembly room designed for balls, concerts and the like.

It also contained the city’s first telephone exchange, the original headquarters of the Chamber of Commerce, and a Masonic Hall, alongside other offices. Restaurants and ‘lounges’ were scattered throughout.

It had originally been built in 1865 to the plans of local architect Edward Holmes. A decade later J.A. Chatwin – responsible for much of Victorian Colmore Row and what is now the Old Joint Stock pub – provided designs that doubled its size.

There was a 21ft high arched entrance to Stephenson Place and a row of shops that continued on New Street, where it adjoined another neo-gothic gem: The King Edward’s Grammar School. Built in 1838 to designs by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin, it became a prototype for their later collaboration on the Houses of Parliament. This bordered, in turn, the seven-storey “Venetian Gothic” Arden Hotel. Further down, to the left, was the tall entrance to a complex of ornate arcades, the City and Midland. 

But there were already clues as to why all these buildings would shortly vanish.

Unlike the obvious peers, Brum was booming in these inter-war years as a result of its new industries: electrical engineering, motor manufacturing. And all that employment and spending power meant that these shopping streets were far more packed almost anywhere else in the country.

But the centre was simply too concentrated for what had rapidly become the country’s most important and affluent big city outside London. The crowds were so dense that police-controlled, one-way walking routes were set up to prevent ‘pedestrian jams’. 

Mass car ownership had already become a reality here when it was still a luxury in most of the country. The resulting traffic jams were already notorious, despite the introduction of Britain’s first large-scale one-way system, which completely baffled outsiders.

Officials had been hard at work since the 1920s to find solutions. Their vision was one of expansion: a new Art Deco civic quarter around Broad Street, and the country’s first ring road, albeit based on shop-lined boulevards not motorways. But only Baskerville House and the Hall of Memory emerged before war broke out in 1939. 

After the war, say in 1960, the scene at New Street was dramatically different. The roof had vanished, destroyed in the blitz. Platforms and footbridges had also been damaged, and it had all been temporarily patched up. Outside, though, the Exchange still stood, albeit grimy and tired-looking.

But the crowds outside were bigger and more cashed-up than ever. Alongside manufacturing, Birmingham’s services sector – banking, insurance and the like – was now expanding just as rapidly. The main streets had a higher retail spend per square foot than the West End.

Developers had taken notice of the demand for modern retail and office space. Birmingham had become, by some margin, the main provincial centre of the mid-century commercial property boom. Even before the council began large-scale demolition, old buildings all over the city were being replaced by new office blocks and shops at a pace unrivalled outside London.

The grammar school had been first to go, in 1937. In its place were two buildings – the Paramount Theatre, later an Odeon, and the Portland Stone King Edward’s House office block, built by local entrepreneur Jack Cotton, who had been to school on the site. The Arden Hotel next door was awaiting demolition.

Cotton would later make his mark internationally, but at this time he was still busying himself in Birmingham. Further down New Street, where the arcades had been flattened by the Luftwaffe (except for the tiny remnant off Union Street), he was building Birmingham’s first purpose-built shopping centre. It was named ‘the big top’ as the site had been used for a circus after the war.

Unsurprisingly, the traffic jams were worse than ever. Something needed to be done, particularly as it might continue to get much, much worse – central government’s plans for motorways had many of them converging on the city.