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Hopes for U.K.’s second-largest city pinned on Bullring mall

BY JON SPRINGER

Birmingham, England’s gleaming new shopping complex is known by the name Bullring, but to its architects and developers, it’s also known as Plan 11-A.

“We started at 1-A, then 1-B, then 2-A and so on,” said James Utting, a design director at Benoy, the London-based architecture firm that designed the $700 million Bullring complex along with a three-company developer consortium called the Birmingham Alliance. “There were all kinds of changes to the plan as we went along.”

The finished product is a boldly designed, 1.2 million-square-foot mall that opened in September at the site of a famously failed and eventually demolished 1960s-era mall called the Bull Ring Shopping Centre. Plan 11-A is the culmination of more than a decade of design and redesign. It was sparked by lessons learned from the past, the imagination of developers and, to an extent, pressure from the city and its New Urbanist-led citizens groups. As such, Bullring stands as a statement to the complexities — and in some cases, the controversies — of a modern retail redevelopment in a busy downtown.

The 1960s Bull Ring development (SCT, April 2002) gave its redevelopers plenty of examples of how not to build a shopping center. Like many urban retail projects of the era, it would be lauded at first, then criticized in retrospect. Its monolithic design and surrounding ring road blocked views, restricted pedestrian access and circulation and relied heavily on automobile traffic. By the 1980s the mall (and the surrounding area) was dilapidated, crime-ridden and badly in need of replacement. Bull Ring’s commonly used descriptor was “godforsaken.”

Birmingham’s boldly designed Bullring replaces an enclosed mall built during a disastrous, pedestrian-unfriendly reconstruction of the city’s center during the 1960s.

The challenge for Bullring’s redesigners, then, was at once to reverse the damage done by the previous developments while driving new retail life into the city. The result is a retail center that combines traditional and futuristic touches and, in Utting’s words, is all about “connectivity and permeability” both inside and outside the center.

“The lesson developers can learn from Bullring is to make their centers connect to the city,” Utting said. “It has to be a part of the city, not just in the city.”

Bullring’s location on a hill slope overlooking the landmark St. Martin’s Parish Church in downtown Birmingham has been the site of retail in the city dating back to the 12th century. The center’s design was influenced by the city’s historic street pattern and its slope, Utting says. The three trading levels each connect to one of seven street-level entrances, and walkways throughout the project (24 routes in all) have been designed to link into the city.

Though St. Martin’s was once obscured from view by the previous project, the church is visible again from New and High streets. The indoor streetscapes themselves are enclosed by a “sky plane,” a glass ceiling that lends an open-air appearance and allows the center to blend in with surrounding architecture.

Two pairs of exposed steel bowstring trusses at the facility’s northern perimeter suspend the buildings over Victorian railway tunnels and allow existing retail frontages to flow into the building, Utting says.

While Bullring’s exterior nods to Birmingham’s historic streetscape, inside tenants and shoppers find modern amenities, many of which are exclusive to the center. The Birmingham Alliance says the interior, from storefronts to signage to bathrooms, takes “mall design to a new level of sensory experience … more typical of an exclusive world-class hotel” than a retail project.

The developers brought in Checkland Kindleysides, a London design consulting firm, to work with retailers and encourage them to make their store spaces one-of-a-kind, says Mel Evans, a spokeswoman for the Birmingham Alliance. Women’s fashion retailer Karen Millen, for example, designed a titanium mezzanine floor resembling a diamond. Department store anchor Debenhams’ 63,000-square-foot “2010” flagship, as the chain calls its new concept, offers such amenities as extra-large changing rooms and personal shopping consultants.

Altogether, 64 retailers not previously represented in Birmingham have opened stores in Bullring, 18 have relocated from other Birmingham sites and 54 opened an additional Birmingham unit at the mall. Many have chosen to make their Bullring store a flagship. (Despite being England’s second-largest city, Birmingham had about half as many shops as Newcastle or Glasgow, Scotland, according to Evans.)

Bullring’s architecture and design guided the placement of the tenants, says Evans. The third level, which connects with traditional Birmingham shopping avenues New and High streets, includes a cluster of upmarket fashion retailers leading from New Street to anchor Selfridges, and some mainstream fashion retailers from High Street to Debenhams. In between, the open-air St. Martin’s Walk provides space for some 15 restaurants and eateries.

Younger fashions and lifestyle retailers dominate the second level, which provides access from train stations on both sides. The lower level houses mobile phone dealers, drugstores and greeting card shops. “Because there’s a feel to carry in from the outside, the clustering of retailers here is very significant as compared to a completely enclosed mall,” Evans said.

Bullring’s retailers and management can avail themselves of advanced management and software technologies built into the structure. A centrally controlled Intranet system allows retailers to connect with center management and vice versa and can instantly update information available to customers on the mall’s 22 touch-screen terminals.

A customer-counting system provides information gleaned from 143 counting devices located at the entrances and in strategic locations throughout the mall. The customer counts are made available at 15-minute intervals to tell management (and subscribing retailers) not only how many customers there are in the mall, but also the areas and times in which they are concentrated and how they move about the building. That information can help retailers tailor their promotions, Evans says.

These counting systems have been busy in the early going. Bullring is averaging about 800,000 visitors per week; the center drew 276,600 on opening day, Sept. 4, which Evans believes is a record for a U.K. shopping center.

Despite early success, there are some criticisms of the finished product. These mainly concern the appropriateness of a single-use facility in a downtown setting and date back to the first discussions of Bull Ring’s redevelopment in 1987. Joe Holyoak, a lecturer of architecture and planning at the University of Central England and a member of the Birmingham for People citizen’s group, says the group influenced the Birmingham City Council to encourage the developers to make significant changes to initial designs. However, the group failed in its mission to promote a multiple-use facility combining commercial, office and residential development.

“Mixed-use today is the conventional wisdom of the new urban design,” Holyoak said. “Birmingham City Council has a drafted policy on this, but failed to make much headway at all. The developer dug in their heels and said, ‘This is what we wanted to do.’”

Holyoak added: “It’s a splendid shopping center, but that’s all it is. It’s disappointingly mono-use. It’s not a genuine piece of city center.”

Visitors to the center can enjoy views of the city’s other landmarks, including St. Martin’s Church.

Though the group succeeded in reducing the scale of the project as first drawn up (allowing the views of St. Martin’s and the division of the structure into city blocks, for example) Holyoak says he feels the City Council simply tired of negotiating changes. He contends further that Bullring’s developers showed a “lack of imagination and an unwillingness to consider a more complex set of management requirements” in their failure to include a residential component.

The developers defend Bullring’s retail-only strategy in part because it brought retail square footage in line with the surrounding population. Birmingham ranked sixth in England in retail square footage, Evans says. The Birmingham Alliance, meanwhile, has plans to develop residential and office space at Martineau Galleries, a 14-acre site in the city center. However, that development will commence only after the impact of Bullring has been assessed, says the developer.

“I believe developers can achieve the retail areas they want with a finer grain — a smaller subdivision of blocks, a finer network of pedestrian spaces and mixed uses. That should be the target,” Holyoak said.

Hammerson acquired the site from London and Edinburgh Trust with planning approvals in place in 1996, but the scheme would keep changing as Hammerson combined with Henderson Global Investors and Land Securities Group to create the Birmingham Alliance in 1999. That combined financial strength proved to be necessary to move the project forward.

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