Brumm

I made my maiden voyage to Birmingham yesterday. It was for a meeting, and not a social visit, so I must admit my exposure level was somewhat limited. However, this is not going to stop me from forming an opinion which I shall now express.

Birmingham is located 90 minutes by train from London, and I'm pretty sure it's in the generally northwest direction. It has numerous train stations, but the biggest one is Birmingham New Street, which is the one the fast trains from London go into. Coming out of the train station, the first thing you see is the Bull Ring. This is not a ring with bulls, it is a massive shopping complex, in many respects one of Birmingham's main draws. And while the pull of the mall was strong, I was sadly not able to partake in its miles and miles of consumer bliss. Instead I got into a cab because the architect's office was located 5 miles away in between an industrial estate and the freeway and there was really no other way to get there.

En route I was a little taken aback by the road dominance in the city center. The road I was on was actually elevated above street level, with I'm assuming another street underneath. I realized that walking would be a daunting task in that part of town. I also went past quite a bit of industrial stuff, also leading me to think of Birmingham as being quite industrial. The architect's office was in a building called Fort Dunlop, and it seemed to be a newly converted (and by converted I mean they left some of the shell and demolished the rest so the front and one of the sides was brick) Dunlop tire factory. The place was truly bizarre, basically I think the architect got a little too high on architect juice before designing this place. There were giant orange dots outside, oddly placed arrows, it took me a while to figure out where the stalls were in the bathroom, and there was a Travelodge built into it that was bright blue, had seemingly no windows on one side and only little round portal windows on the other. Oh, and as its in the middle of nowhere, you don't want to stay there on your visit to the city.

Here is what else I know about Birmingham: it has canals that are apparently decently cute, has, if not a top notch university, at least a rather respectable one of decent size, Ozzy Osbourne is from there, and it's where you go to catch a train to Aberystwyth. While there were definite signs of redevelopment, I still foresee a lot of room for improvement. Will I go back? Most definitely.... I have another meeting at that architect's office on the 23rd...