The number of cranes visible from the private dining room at Orelle, the restaurant on the 24th floor of 103 Colmore Row in Birmingham, stretches comfortably into the double digits. It’s a bird’s-eye-view perspective on how much development is underway across the city – including, to the south, the sprawling £1.9bn Smithfield scheme.
The restaurant was the setting for the first EG Cities lunch earlier this month. Twelve public- and private-sector professionals gathered to break bread and debate the opportunities and challenges facing the city.
Birmingham has come a long way, guests agreed, and the pace of change in the built environment is only picking up with the launch of the Our Future City framework, which will shape development through to 2040. But parts of the city remain “difficult nuts to crack” when it comes to regeneration, noted Shoosmiths partner James Needham.
Developing and sharing a vision for what Birmingham does next and ensuring that the public and private sectors can, as Savills director Michael Maguire put it, “connect the dots” between varied schemes and neighbourhoods will call for dedication and fresh thinking about what a city centre needs to offer.
Here are some takeaways from the conversation.
Today’s Birmingham is a far cry from yesteryear
Richard Smith came to Birmingham in 1972. Now 70, the Yorkshireman is the joint owner of developer Opus Land. The city and its people are completely different from when he arrived, he said.
“When I first came to Birmingham, let’s not mince words, it was a dump,” Smith said. “Centre City would have just been going up. The Bullring, the Rotunda was there. Only a year after I was here, it had the IRA bomb at the Mulberry Bush. It was a bad time for Birmingham and Brummies were fed up. They kept their heads down, didn’t really have much of a sense of humour. Look at the change today. This is now one of the most exciting cities in Europe. It has the youngest population of any city in Europe. What an achievement in that short amount of time.”
The change doesn’t go unnoticed, said Jon Baty, head of investment at the West Midlands Growth Company, which carries out perception studies to gauge what people inside and outside the UK think about Birmingham and the wider region.
“We tend to find that international perceptions are not as hamstrung by the legacy and memory of what the city used to be like in the 1970s,” Baty said. “A part of that is a huge transformation in the balance of industries. As recently as the mid-1990s, you probably had somewhere in the order of 35% of the population of the region working in the manufacturing sector. That’s down to 11% now, and you have high-productivity tech, financial and professional service sectors going in the other direction to make up a larger share.”
A facelift for the city has helped. “The pace of change has accelerated,” said Sadie Janes, development director at Savills. “In the past five to eight years it has very much ramped up. When I first started at Savills and we were looking at various schemes in Digbeth, everyone was tapping away working on it and nothing really happened. But the pace has definitely accelerated in terms of how many projects are now coming through, bouncing off the original Brindley Places and Mailboxes.”
Public and private sectors are forging a vision
As council chief executive Deborah Cadman told EG at the UKREiiF conference, Birmingham’s achievements have been driven by “phenomenal partnerships and joint ventures” between the public and private sectors.
EG’s guests concurred. “The city has backed some of the key developments here in the past few years,” said Gerard Ludlow, whose Stoford Developments has prelet its redevelopment of the city’s old Typhoo Tea factory to the BBC. “Viability in the city centre even today is difficult, and the city acknowledged that, put their money where their mouth is and backed the key schemes that have really improved the city centre.
“I know they are doing that in Digbeth – they are supporting what we are doing with the BBC and looking at a lot of infrastructure improvements. Getting that public realm right, the sense of place development, is key to driving good-quality regeneration. The city, the administration, clearly get that… The council and the political leadership have a massive part to play in driving the vision forward. They have got it by the scruff of the neck.”
And new businesses are on the way, including SEGRO, which in May was named a strategic partner of the West Midlands Combined Authority and will now invest £2bn in the region over the next decade.
“The West Midlands region and Birmingham are a focus if you are wanting to make a large industrial investment within the UK,” said SEGRO senior director Charles Blake. “You see the positives, you see the vibrancy around us here with the bars, the cultural element. The city, with the political leadership on both sides, are fostering that, harnessing that effectively. And the more everyone does that, the more it will continue to grow. And that’s why, from SEGRO’s point of view, we want to come and invest. We want to be here.”
City centre living needs focus…
Shoosmiths partner Jason Jackson welcomed regeneration of the city centre but bemoaned “minuscule” options for city centre living.
“I was a student at Aston Uni in 1988, and I was in a tower block that has been knocked down. You could rent the rooms for about £7 a week in the holidays and some of us used to stay. It was great – a flat in the centre of Birmingham when there weren’t any at all,” Jackson said.
He went on to buy his first flat, a two-bed, ground-floor apartment in Crosby Homes’ Symphony Court, in 1996. “It was absolutely fantastic. Then it went a bit mad and there was a vogue of apartments being developed in the centre of Birmingham,” he said. “It felt like we were one of the first regional cities to do that… I think we are probably behind the curve now.”
Sarah Scannell, assistant director of planning at Birmingham City Council, hopes to see a greater number of developers offer family homes in the middle of town.
“What we see a lot of is one, maybe two-bed apartment blocks, mostly for rent in the city,” she said. “It makes an interesting dynamic in a city centre where, from a pure placemaking perspective, you want a complete trajectory of the whole of human society working alongside each other to make the vitality of a town centre.
“How we make that work is something that the Future City framework is trying to approach. But it takes big shifts in infrastructure to make a family want to come and live in the centre of Birmingham.”
As do the offices of the future
Calthorpe Estates is “trying to drive change” across its 1,600-acre estate in Edgbaston, said property director Richard Suart, who joined the company in late 2021. Some of the effort is focused on changing entire areas – the Hagley Road heading into the city centre is somewhere that Suart says the estate has “really got to change the narrative”. Other parts of the drive are about what is happening inside the buildings.
“The big challenge for us is that we have signed up to the net zero pledge for 2050,” Suart said. “That is a real challenge when you start to look at some of our buildings, which are very old. We can get to an EPC rating of C comfortably in our buildings, with a reasonable amount of money. But when you start [to say] we want an EPC A and to really drive change, that difference between being an A and a C, for us, is massive on an office… the investment needed could be perceived as a barrier.”
At Smithfield, the Lendlease team is working with the council to provide new homes and workspace. Rachel Edwards, Lendlease’s workplace futures lead, said the offices within the scheme will need to reflect changing requirements on an individual and sector-wide basis.
“A lot of businesses are moving more to flex to understand what they need from their property, reliance on more amenity space and things like that,” she said. “But there are bigger shifts that we probably need to be looking at, which are more aligned with the supply chains, new technology coming in and how industries will operate and partner with one another.
“The big opportunity we have here is that there are lots of different types of industries starting to agglomerate in different areas. A 15-minute walk isn’t that far. It’s not really about agglomerating in Digbeth or the Jewellery Quarter or Brindley Place. If we were to take the whole city and look at it as this collection of industries that can partner, then perhaps there is a crossover in their supply chains and the way that they will innovate together. Then we have a massive opportunity.”
Don’t forget the Peaky Blinders effect
For John Plumridge from Birmingham City University’s estates and development team, there is one factor that has firmly put Birmingham on the global stage – and which will continue to drive the city’s success as it builds out its creative industries.
“I think this is the biggest thing for the image of Birmingham in its history: Peaky Blinders,” he said. “My son lives in Berlin, and he went out for a drink with somebody and said to them, ‘My dad works in Birmingham.’ [They replied] ‘Oh my God, can I speak to him?’ It is all over the world. It has put Birmingham on the map with a name, with a cultural arts-based profile that is unprecedented. People don’t understand the scale of this thing.”
Plenty of people in Birmingham do, though – and real estate developers will be keeping the city’s creative industries firmly in their sights as they plan Birmingham’s next chapter of change.
The panel
- Jon Baty, head of investment, West Midlands Growth Company
- Charles Blake, senior director, SEGRO
- Rachel Edwards, workplace futures lead, Lendlease
- Jason Jackson, partner, Shoosmiths
- Sadie Janes, development director, Savills
- Gerard Ludlow, director, Stoford Developments
- Michael Maguire, director, Savills
- James Needham, partner, Shoosmiths
- John Plumridge, director of estates and facilities, Birmingham City University
- Sarah Scannell, assistant director of planning, Birmingham City Council
- Richard Smith, joint owner and managing director, Opus Land
- Richard Suart, property director, Calthorpe Estates
To send feedback, e-mail tim.burke@eg.co.uk or tweet @_tim_burke or @EGPropertyNews
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