Mount Fuji, Bullring, Birmingham, B5 4BH. Tel: 0121 633 9853
Verdict 6/10
Birmingham was the most heavily bombed city outside London during the Second World War, tonnes of explosives raining down from the night skies.
The Luftwaffe really needn’t have bothered. If they wanted to obliterate the urban landscape, all they had to do was ring up the planning department at Birmingham City Council and let the boys with the theodolites do the dirty work.
Fast forward 70 years and we were meant to have learned from the mistakes of the past, of the folly of demolishing historic facades to make way for concrete collars. So what the heck’s gone on at the Bull Ring?
The old, grey central shopping area, famous for fetish clothing outlets and pigeons, was bulldozed to make way for the reborn Bullring (one word, please, this is a rebrand) and so was born a many-splendored consumer citadel for the 21st century.
Architecturally, all things considered, it was all right, if shopping is your thing.
In fact, people have come to love Laurence Broderick’s bronze bull sculpture, currently cloaked in a winter jumper, and appreciate the contrast between the sparkling, curved Selfridges building and the Gothic charms of St Martin in the Bullring.
The panorama was one of the highlights of new-look Brum, modernism’s organic thrust and Victorian sensibilities standing side by side, each doffing its cap to the other.
Now they have created something called Spiceal Street – a marketing gimmick to ram more restaurants into the Bullring.
Apparently, Spiceal Street is a “social hub,” although in this context social hub equates to a Thai “banquet” restaurant and an outlet for a chain “brasserie.” Spiceal Street, so-named in the belief that spices were flogged around here in the Dark Ages to budding pan-Asian chefs, may or may not also encompass Nando’s. What a coup for Birmingham.
My big gripe with Spiceal Street is the fact that it has totally trashed the sense of openness that prevailed here.
There used to be dramatic contrast between the silver shields of Selfridges and the bricks and mortar of the church.
Now everything is crammed in by the encroaching new development. Where people used to stop and stare, they now hunch their shoulders and bustle along amid the shadows of the domineering Spiceal St construction.
It’s like stepping back to the hooligan architecture of the 1970s.
Who signed off these plans at the city council? And what buffoons on the planning committee approved them? Well done, guys, you’ve made a right pig’s ear of it.
Difficult as it was, I eschewed the temptations of Nando’s peri-peri cluck-cluck and went to one of the city centre’s few independent restaurants, Mount Fuji, for my solitary double-dip recession Christmas lunch.
I had meant to pop in to Mount Fuji for years but stupidly got seduced by the false promise of places like Jamie’s Italian (which again may, or may not, be part of Spiceal St).
