Memories of Birmingham
900 prints 15" x 19", and 50 prints 20" x 24", 1995.
In the autumn of 1995 I turned up in the centre of Birmingham and was taken aback. Many of the street patterns were as I remember when I lived in the city as a boy, but much had been done to them and changed around them. Particularly striking was the Gas Street Basin and the ICC on Broad Street with its broad piazza link through to the Council House and New Street — all pedestrianised. There seemed to be more Victorian shopping arcades than I remember, all of a more sumptuous quality than the malls of today; the Rotunda was just as squat (ground conditions dictated the planned height could not be built); the old cartoon cinema was now the Electric — what an elevation! I couldn't resist putting my old Ford Popular and Morris Convertible into the picture as well as the maroon and cream Corporation buses that used to take me to school.