FT MAGAZINE 
It was a monument to provincial pride in reinforced concrete and glass. When the Duke of Edinburgh opened the Birmingham Bull Ring in May 1964, it was the largest indoor shopping centre in Europe, with a total floor area of 23 acres. Inspired by American suburban malls, the Bull Ring promised “coatless shopping” in an air-conditioned, temperature-controlled hall maintained at “late-spring level”.
The Bull Ring was right in the middle of Birmingham’s other great innovation of this era: the inner ring road. Midland Red buses brought shoppers in to a bus station built directly under the building; motorists had their cars parked by uniformed valets. The Bull Ring was designed as a great civic space with tropical plants, ornamental fountains and an aluminium aviary with macaws, parakeets and cockatoos from Dudley Zoo.
“Be amazed… there’s nothing quite like it in the world,” proclaimed the publicity film, narrated by the newsreader Richard Baker and shown in local cinemas. The Bull Ring, Baker went on, had stiletto-proof floors, pram parks for mothers and soothing Muzak to create “a warm, gay and welcoming atmosphere… strains brought on by boredom are removed from staff, making service a real pleasure… in this traffic-free city of shops, shopping is a gay adventure, not an ordeal”.
The Bull Ring was soon followed by similarly gargantuan indoor shopping malls in other cities such as London’s Elephant and Castle (1965), Liverpool’s St John’s Shopping Centre (1965) and Manchester’s Arndale centre (1976). But the shoppers’ dream soon soured. The Bull Ring may have boasted the largest Woolworths in Europe, but on the opening day, many of the other shops had yet to open. The upper floors proved hard to let, and were soon dotted with vacant lots and whitewashed windows. The Bull Ring was also famously hard to navigate, partly because its floorplan followed the layout of the old market and the streets it had replaced.
By the time it was earmarked for redevelopment at the end of the century, the Bull Ring had become something of a national joke, a reminder of that not too distant era when the indoor shopping centre proudly heralded the terrazzo-floored, strip-lighted future. A brand-new centre, Bullring Birmingham, opened in 2003.
