Terry Grimley: While Eastside waits, Manchester gets even more trams

Jul 23 2008 By Terry Grimley

Thanks to the internet I’ve just caught up with the news feature BBC Midlands made a couple of months ago about Birmingham’s G8 summer and its legacy.

It’s something in which I have a personal interest because I was invited to contribute my own tuppence worth on the subject of whether Birmingham had moved on from its annus mirabilis, when G8, Eurovision and the Lions Convention had the city heaving with world leaders, international visitors and media over a few summer weeks.

This is an interesting year to look back from, because it’s really a tale of two decades.

It’s 20 years from the Highbury Initiative, the weekend conference which came up with a broad strategy for Birmingham to dig its way out of the concrete which was poured all over its centre in the 1960s.

Essentially it meant getting rid of the inner ring road and the maze of pedestrian underpasses, and while much has been achieved it is likely to steer planning for a few years yet.

Highbury and the G8 summer were linked by an exhilarating decade which brought us the ICC, the NIA, Brindleyplace, the pedestrianisation of New Street and the creation of Centenary and Victoria Squares.

Work on construction of the first line of the Midland Metro light rail system was also under way by 1998 and few would have guessed that ten years on there would be no start date in sight for an extension.

It was a great period for arts development, seeing the advent of Symphony Hall, Ikon Gallery and the Gas Hall, and the arrival of Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, soon to be renamed Birmingham Royal Ballet, in the city. Simon Rattle’s Towards the Millennium festival put the city at the forefront of imaginative arts programming in the UK.

The remarkable summer of 1998 really put the crown on that decade. “This is the impression we want to give of Britain,” said Tony Blair, but it was really Birmingham’s can-do ability to manage big events at short notice that brought the G8 to the city.

But moving on from there, Birmingham began to do less well. It succeeded in winning the largest grant for a millennium project outside London and spent it building a big box in Eastside into which some – not all – exhibits from the popular Museum of Science and Industry were crammed, now only accessible at a hefty admission charge.

Nationally, Millennium Point had virtually no impact on the public consciousness.

Not even a notorious failure like Sheffield’s National Centre for Popular Music, it simply wasn’t noticed.

Just imagine the benefit to the city’s profile if The Eden Project (which was actually cheaper) had been built here.

My theory is that the failure of Millennium Point had a knock-on effect on the Capital of Culture competition. While images of Gateshead’s Millennium Bridge, Baltic Mill and Sage Music Centre where everywhere, the metropolitan view of Birmingham – it used to be interesting in the 1990s, but then Simon Rattle left – went largely unchallenged.

In 2003 the city did receive a real boost with the opening of the new Bull Ring.

The case for iconic architecture was finally demonstrated when images of the bulbous, silver-clad Selfridges store went round the world.

But while there were some very good things in the Bull Ring scheme there were also some pretty poor ones, and it had the backward-looking effect of re-associating the city centre with a shopping centre devoted entirely to chain stores.

Today it’s difficult to quite know where the city is. Eastside, for example, is a concept of almost mind-numbing potential, but the few parts delivered so far, at Masshouse and the student flats development fronting the middle ring road, are of disappointing architectural quality.

There is a danger that the whole area could end up as little more than a dull business park, though the Birmingham City University campus at least promises a dash of excitement.

Arts policy seems to be a thing of the past at the council and as for transport policy – file under “cars and buses”.

Meanwhile Manchester’s Metrolink tram system is not only about to undergo a “big bang” expansion – admittedly at the cost of congestion charging – but it is now entirely powered by hydro-electricity.

Millions of passengers, carried across Greater Manchester, without pollution on the streets and with a zero carbon footprint. Now there’s a go-ahead city for you.