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Shopping Centers Today -> April 2002
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CITY HEART TRANSPLANT
Birmingham BullRing anchors Europe’s largest urban reconstruction
By Susan Thorne
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| Currently the city center is a concrete wasteland shunned by its citizens. Developers plan to change their minds. |
City planners in Birmingham, England, are hoping to find their city’s salvation in the BullRing.
Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city and a powerhouse of its industrial revolution, has not always benefited from efforts to restore its vitality. During the 1960s city planners eradicated its historic downtown, turning swaths of the city into a concrete-wasteland habitat for cars and roving gangs of unemployed youth. Having learned its lesson the hard way, the city is now attempting to re-create the downtown as a gathering place for people, in what currently is Europe’s largest retail regeneration project. At the core of this rejuvenation is the Birmingham BullRing, a £500 million ($700 million) shopping, dining and meeting area that will bring 1.2 million square feet of new retail space to the city.
Three London-based developers that have joined forces as the Birmingham Alliance are undertaking the project. They are Hammerson, Henderson Global Investors and Land Securities. Besides the money the parties are spending on the BullRing, they are investing an additional £300 million in other retail and mixed-use projects in the city.
The BullRing recently moved into the construction phase and is on track for completion in October 2003. More than half the total retail space has already been leased, and the tenant lineup includes leading British department stores Selfridges and Debenhams and large-format stores of between 18,000 and 50,000 square feet for apparel retailers Benetton, Gap, Hennes & Mauritz, NEXT and ZARA. There will also be a big-format bookstore, a music store and an electronics retailer, plus about 100 other shops, restaurants and eateries offering merchandise in the middle to upper price points.
Such a retail offering would be an asset to any community, but the BullRing’s significance for Birmingham goes far beyond this. The new center replaces an aging 1960s mall (called the Bull Ring Shopping Centre, which at the time was the largest shopping center outside North America) that was surrounded by a circular highway. Awkward to access except by car, the center dominated and divided the central downtown area; eventually, it deteriorated and became crime-ridden.
In contrast to the away-with-the-old spirit of the 1960s, which devastated cities in Britain and the United States alike, the current project draws inspiration from the history of Birmingham and its urban character. The city got its start in the 12th century as a market town where farmers and merchants sold their wares to customers from the city and surrounding towns.
Designed as an enclosed downtown streetscape (a horizontal “sky plane” of glass will form a roof to give it an open-air appearance), the BullRing will have a variety of storefront styles and materials instead of the homogeneous look of many enclosed malls.
“We’ve tried to create an urban grain that is not monolithic but broken into city blocks with streets and squares,” explained James Utting, senior associate director with London architectural firm Benoy, who also helped design Bluewater, the acclaimed mall that opened outside London in September 2000. Openness is a key element in the design.
“It will look like a main street and feel as if you’re outside,” Utting said. The mall will also be more accessible than its predecessor; with the old ring road gone, the new retail area will be pedestrian-friendly and better connected to surrounding parts of town.
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The site of the center slopes downward toward the landmark St. Martin’s church. The new BullRing will restore traditional walkways that disappeared under the old center and open up a panoramic view of the church from the top of New Street that was blocked by the old shopping center. A new civic square will also be built beside the church.
“We see the church as an asset, something to use and incorporate within the project,” Utting said. Historic street names from the 18th century that disappeared during the 1960s urban reconstruction — Jamaica Row, Spiceal Street and Swan Passage (after the earlier Swan Alley) — are being revived for thoroughfares within the mall.
“This is the new direction of malls — schemes that are more open, that reflect public life and needs, and build on what people like about cities,” said Jon Emery, director of development for Hammerson. Though he won’t speculate about sales, Emery predicted that there will be 30 million to 40 million visitors to the BullRing in the first year of its operation.
City officials, eager to improve the quality of the downtown environment and re-establish Birmingham as a retail destination for its surrounding area, are strongly supportive of the project. Despite its 4.3 million inhabitants, Birmingham was “losing out” to retail destinations outside the city, observed Mike Taylor, a planner for Birmingham City Council. “We wanted to restore the city to the regional capital role that it should have.”
One milestone was the forging of the Birmingham Alliance from what had been a rivalry in the mid-1990s between Hammerson and the partnership of Land Securities and Henderson. The parties were facing off with two retail projects for the city, competing for tenants and sites.
“Nothing was happening because of the competition,” Taylor recalled. “We [the city] were keen to see revitalization of the urban core, so we said, ‘Look, chaps, it’s in your mutual best interest to work together.’”
This mediation brought about an agreement among the development parties in February 1999, and planning permission for the project was secured the following May. Though the city provided no financial assistance, it helped with site assembly by using its powers of eminent domain to require one reluctant private landowner to sell.
Partnership with the city has been important for the developers in other ways, too, Hammerson’s Emery noted. Most recently, they have teamed up with six public organizations to form the Birmingham Employment Partnership, which is creating programs to recruit and train the 8,000 employees needed to staff the BullRing’s stores.
Demolition of the old Bull Ring, which required the removal of roughly 65,000 tons of concrete from the former shopping center, started in June 2000. An early step in the development process was the relocation of Birmingham’s indoor fresh food and vendors’ market to a new facility near the BullRing site in September 2000. BullRing’s construction has now proceeded to the point where Selfridges was able to take over its store premises for build-out in February, one month ahead of schedule.
Emery said he sees the BullRing as stimulating further regeneration of the downtown. Rising confidence in the city is shown by retail arrivals like the new Beatties department store last September and by the fact that some retailers plan multiple locations there; Gap and Benetton opened new downtown locations last year, for example, besides having stores in the BullRing.
The center will tie in well with retail on New Street, an adjacent shopping thoroughfare with a large House of Fraser department store, and with public transportation; the BullRing is built over railroad tracks and connects with two railway terminals, one of which is slated for a major refurbishment. Other projects proposed for Birmingham include Martineau Galleries, with 1.5 million square feet of retail, which the Alliance parties will embark on after the BullRing is finished.
These combined projects will help Birmingham’s citizenry reclaim the center of their city from the tyrannies of the motor car and miscreant youth that have held sway there until recently.
“I think the most significant impact is on the city itself,” Emery said. “The BullRing is such a major piece of Birmingham, and this project has taken away a negative element and provided something beneficial in its place.”
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