The concrete city
The futuristic Bull Ring Shopping Centre opens in 1964, the Rotunda follows, and the Inner Ring Road carves a new city out of the old. Neighbourhoods are cleared and communities rehoused — upheaval and optimism side by side, remembered very differently by those who lived it.
City centre · 1968
The concrete city rises — Bull Ring, ring road, Rotunda
In May 1964 the new Bull Ring Shopping Centre opened — one of the first indoor shopping centres in Britain, hailed as the future of retail. The cylindrical Rotunda rose beside it, the Inner Ring Road looped concrete around the city's heart, and planners spoke proudly of Birmingham as Britain's motor city, rebuilt for the automobile age.
The new city
Old streets meet the motor age · John Ball collection
The price of the future was paid by the past. Slum clearance swept away thousands of back-to-back houses — and with them, tight-knit working-class streets where families had lived for generations. Communities were rehoused in new estates and tower blocks at the city's edge: better bathrooms and indoor toilets, but often, residents recalled, at the cost of the neighbourliness the old streets had held.
Ask two Brummies about the concrete city and you may get two different stories — pride in a modern, ambitious Birmingham; grief for the streets and communities that vanished. Both are true, and both belong in this archive. Oral histories of the clearances, the moves, and the new estates are among the memories we most urgently want to record.