The Exchange, Stephenson Place

History

A building for business

Birmingham’s merchants wanted a place of their own to meet and trade. On 8 February 1862 a company with £20,000 capital announced plans for “a set of Exchange Buildings, on a piece of land fronting the railway station, in New Street”. The Building News described the competition designs that August. Edward Holmes’s Gothic design was chosen, and the builders Branson and Murray won the contract at £19,300.

H. Van Wart laid the foundation stone on 21 January 1863. Under it, in a glass bottle, went newspapers, coins and plans of the building. The Mayor, Henry Wiggin, opened the Exchange on 2 January 1865.

Gothic on the corner

The main front ran some 180 feet along Stephenson Place, the short street that led from New Street down to the station. The front to New Street was much narrower, about 63 feet. The building rose four storeys, in rows of arched windows that changed shape floor by floor, with trefoiled arches near the top. Above the cornice was a high-pitched roof, “slated in parti-colours”, with dormers.

Over the entrance to the Exchange, in the middle of the Stephenson Place front, rose a tower about 100 feet high (Showell says 110) with a clock by John Inshaw and a slender spire. The hall-keeper lived in it. Old pictures also show an oriel and a thin spirelet on the corner with New Street.

Inside, the ground floor was let as shops. The exchange room was 70 feet by 40 and 23 feet high, its ceiling carried on iron columns and wrought-iron arches. Above it was an assembly room of the same size but loftier, “frequently used for balls, concerts, and entertainments of a public character”, as Showell put it. There were refreshment and dining rooms, a Masonic room on the third floor, offices, and the Chamber of Commerce.

The centre of Birmingham

The Exchange stood at what Showell called “the central spot of the borough”. Just in front of it, at the top of Stephenson Place, stood the marble statue of the reformer Thomas Attwood, unveiled in 1859. The statue was the official point from which distances from Birmingham were measured.

Twice the size

In 1876–78 J. A. Chatwin enlarged the building to nearly twice its original size, mainly by extending the New Street front. The Ordnance Survey plan of 1887–88 shows the result: about 183 feet along Stephenson Place and about 106 feet along New Street.

A century, almost to the day

The Exchange outlived its century, but only just. In 1964 the Victoria County History still counted it among the town’s prominent Gothic buildings. In 1965 it came down, almost exactly a hundred years after it opened. A photograph taken from the Queen’s Hotel shows it half demolished, with taxis waiting below and the new Rotunda rising behind.

The same spot, then and now

1888–1913

Today

The demolition men found the glass bottle under the foundation stone, with its newspapers, coins and plans. The Victorians had buried a message for the future, and a century later the future dug it up to make way for Jack Cotton’s Exchange Buildings.

Why it disappeared

Commercial redevelopment · Redevelopment

In 1965 the site was redeveloped for Exchange Buildings, a slab-and-podium office and shop block designed by Cotton, Ballard & Blow for the developer Jack Cotton, at the same time as New Street station was being rebuilt.