This post is a reflection on a particular time in the history of my personal hedge. These images are screencaps from an old TV programme called Public Eye, some of which are set in Birmingham. The town planning of Birmingham of the sixties was notorious, although as I have commented before, the ephemeral nature of the 'concrete collar' round the city centre is what made another redevelopment possible: retention of the original buildings would have led to more listings & crippled development.
Several of the scenes are round the Bull Ring, also capialising on the Rotunda. The one with the actor running along a concrete wall is by the old bus station. Some scenes in the programme are actually shot in the Bull Ring bus station, but I didn't feel inclined to include them - it always was unsavoury.
What these images do do is show how visually effective Birmingham's sixties design was. The last two scenes are from underpasses (I don't know which, just generic underpasses), which could almost have been designed as settings for a gritty sixties TV series about a private investigator! I also like the architectural nature of the tile mural in one of them. Although the design was widely criticised virtually from the start, these images serve as a reminder of what Birmingham was like for a relatively short period of time, when a despised element of its history was all new & shiny!
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