Spirit of Place: Paradise Place

It is axiomatic that if a place has a name containing such words as paradise, heaven & so on, it is going to be awful, & Birmingham's Paradise Place, which is actually underneath the not-so-bad-in-comparison Paradise Circus, is no exception. I went there fortuitously, since I actually meant to write a post about ghost signs today, & thought the Jewellery Quarter would be an ideal place to see some. On the way there on the bus I realised that I'd never explored the area just to the right as you look at the back entrance (on Great Charles Street Queensway) of the museum & art gallery, so made a mental note to do so if my search for ghost signs should prove fruitless which it did.

This is going to be a picture-heavy post, with a mixture of archive pictures & my own, but remember that in the next couple of years *nothing* on this post will be there any more. The central library is exempt from listing until 2016 so it's got to be demolished before then, unless the council want to be saddled with it for eternity, & with it will go the rest of that 1960s development that went horribly wrong. You see, this is the point, that this is part of a plan for that side of the city that is not what was planned. The first picture shows city architect John Madin with the model of the plan for that part of the city. Even that wasn't the first uncompleted plan, an earlier plan had fallen through, leaving Baskerville House & the Hall of Memory the only parts of it ever built. If you are a brutalist architecture & want to see John Madin's work, you'd better rush to Birmingham soon, because his buildings have a strange habit of getting demolished. As you can see from the picture there was a huge leisure & commercial plan for that whole area. All that was completed was the library in the centre, with on one side the school of music & a shopping arcade, leaving the gap under the inverted ziggurat empty. Apparently for some time after the central library opened in 1974 there was only a scaffolding bridge from Paradise Circus over the road to Broad Street. The gap was glassed in & shops constructed in the 1980s: this is bemoaned only by the hardcore fans of brutalist architecture. The second picture shows it 'before', & also shows an example of the concrete staircases so beloved of 1960s architects.

On the other side of the library is the bit where it went horribly wrong & was not really capable of being papered over in any way. Naturally service routes into the development had to be provided, there was even a plan for an underground bus station (presumably just as horrible as the one in the Bull Ring). I suspect that where I went today was what would have been part of the bus station. I feel it also explains why coaches have always stopped on that strange island near the college of food: because it was going to be a public transport hub that never happened.

The third picture shows what you see of Paradise Place as you go past on Easy Row, & another brutalist staircase. I have always always wanted to go up it & see where it went. Presumably a lot of other people have also wanted to since it's fenced in with wire, & the opening at the bottom is securely boarded up. I have seen the building that goes over the road there described as the council house extension (the fourth picture is a newspaper cutting about the construction of that area): whatever it is it looks grim, dirty, & semi- or even unused.

I entered Paradise Place by the staircase (fifth picture), which is what attracted my attention in the first place. I love the way there is a sign telling you what this part of the city (where nobody but the curious & homeless go) is called: ironic really to tell you to come to Paradise, invite you, then find it such a dive. A long concrete bridge thing (sixth picture) takes you behind the staircase I would so like to explore to an area (seventh picture) where apparently there used to be fountains in the seventies, but they're long gone & the area is now simply grim. It is evident that homeless people sleep there (& further down). Now here's a strange thing, since this is a spirit of place post (I hadn't forgotten), I never once felt threatened in Paradise Place, even though it's exactly the sort of place (underground, dark, neglected, hidden corners) that ought to be terrifying). Perhaps it's simply that nobody goes there, but it seems I'm not the only one to perceive it as unthreatening, as witnessed by the homeless people sleeping there. The sense of seclusion is increased by a nearby subway being gated off (seventh picture): I'm sure I have passed by that gate on the other side with no idea that it was accessible from both sides. Conversely there also a sensation in Paradise Place that it is somewhere you 'shouldn't' go, or rather it gives out mixed messages about its status. There are optimistic signs giving its name even in the completely dark part (eighth picture), presumably a legacy from when this place was intended to be part of a bright new development. Perhaps that's it, Paradise Place gives out mixed messages because it was intended as an optimistic 1960s development, it was intended for public use. This bright new 'spirit of place' was cut short by the fact it was never completed as intended: those kind of buildings always has a sad feel about them, & remain as monuments to (often) one person's grandiosely impractical vision. As the seventies & eighties progressed & fashions changed, Paradise Place's fortunes would have fallen further. I mean, the reason it's still there is nobody goes there, so the land owner (presumably the council) has never been embarrassed enough to rehabilitate it. Interestingly, though, its fortunes have never fallen far enough for it to be abandoned completely. Access was easy today, although it's bollarded off from the road, yet there were cars there - I'm not sure how they got there, frankly, it's a very confusing area! It actually feels as if you've strayed into a private service area, you look for signs saying it's private but there aren't any.

The remaining pictures are of sights to thrill any fan of brutalist architecture. I didn't take any pictures of Paradise Place's inmost section, I mean I wouldn't want strangers tramping through my bedroom & publishing the pictures. I also felt a strange impulse to record the existence of Paradise Place before it vanishes completely (there's very little on the internet except a thread on skyscraper city saying what a disgrace it is). I felt sorry for it, I have no recollection of walking that way before although I feel I must have done when I was much younger, when its fortunes were perhaps at a slightly higher ebb. I suppose I want to record... A brave attempt to 'improve' a city? A hidden-away planning disaster? The area even incites mixed motives.

As for Madin himself, I only get a sense of sadness: how unfortunate for an architect to have his buildings reviled & demolished in his lifetime (he died in 2012)! This seems to be the lot of all the brutalist architects of the 1960s - the architect of Cardross Seminary has spoken about how it seemed his building was deliberately destroyed by the Archdiocese of Glasgow (I suppose because it was a memorial to their doomed 1950s triumphalism). Madin's obituary in the Architect's Journal quotes Bob Ghosh of Birmingham-based K4 Architects:

�Madin was a serious architect, who understood form, space and material, unlike many of his contemporaries. [Yet] due to the pace of change in our city, many of Madin�s buildings have now disappeared. Some should have been retained, most notably the Post and Mail building and plaza, which had more than a subtle reference to Mies.�Had he ultimately realised the ambition of building the inverted ziggurat form of the Birmingham Central Library in shimmering white stone, then perhaps it would have been listed, rather than being condemned as another example of concrete Brutalism. The more I see of Mecanoo�s new replacement Library of Birmingham, with its highly stylised form and its frivolous envelope, I can�t help questioning whether we�re doing the right thing.�Nevertheless, we did need a new library for the 21st century, and Argent and Glenn Howells will replace Madin�s building with something of extraordinary quality and address the dysfunctional spaces around it.' (http://m.architectsjournal.co.uk/8624761.article)

A list of his buildings (as I say, look quickly, they have a short life span) is here: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_John_Madin_buildings

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