The Bull Ring: three rebuildings

Probably in 1166, Peter, lord of Birmingham, received a royal grant of a market to be held every Thursday at his castle. Everything else in Birmingham has moved, been renamed or been knocked down. The market is still there, on the slope below St Martin’s Church, more than 850 years later.

The old market place

William Westley’s map of 1731 shows the corn market in the Bull Ring, the shambles above it and the beast market in the High Street. The name probably comes from bull-baiting. In 1817 the Street Commissioners opened Smithfield market on the moat of the old manor house. In 1809 the town put up its first public statue in the Bull Ring: Richard Westmacott’s bronze of Lord Nelson, now listed Grade II*.

Then came the grand building. Charles Edge’s Market Hall opened in 1835, with massive Doric columns at its entrances and room for some 600 stalls. A wholesale fish market followed in Bell Street in 1869.

The shell

On the night of 25–26 August 1940 incendiaries gutted the Market Hall. The traders put up covered stalls inside the walls and carried on. The council’s own 1995 history says that as late as 1956 there were plans to give it a new roof. Instead, the decision was taken to route the Inner Ring Road round it and demolish it as well. A Laing photograph of 1962 shows the walls still standing beside the building site; one of John Ball’s slides of 1963 shows what was left of them. They had gone by the mid-1960s, and the patch of grass that replaced them was named Manzoni Gardens, after the City Engineer.

The 1964 centre

The new Bull Ring was built by John Laing, using designs by the architect James A. Roberts, in less than three years. It was opened on 29 May 1964 by the Duke of Edinburgh in front of large crowds. Historic England calls it “the first indoor city-centre shopping centre in the UK” and, at the time, “one of the largest enclosed shopping centres outside America”.

It was meant to dazzle. There were 140 shop units, market stalls, cafés, a ballroom and a hairdresser. Air conditioning was said to give “an atmosphere of late spring all year round”, music played, and a blue and gold macaw called Polly, lent by Dudley Zoo, lived in the centre. William “Kirby” Laing wrote in the firm’s magazine in July 1964: “It is undoubtedly the world’s most advanced shopping centre and I think it is going to change the shopping habits of the whole Midlands.”

Next to it rose Roberts’s Rotunda, a 24-storey round office tower begun in 1960 and finished in 1964–65.

Falling out of love

It did not last. The centre sat inside the ring road, reached through subways and ramps, and its grey concrete aged badly. Historic England notes that by the 1980s “many people started to dislike the grey Brutalist design”. The planning historians Peter Larkham and David Adams say it was “professionally and publicly derided from the mid-1980s”. Plans to replace it came and went for a decade.

One part was saved. On 9 August 2000 the Rotunda was listed Grade II, as “a prominent landmark on a hilltop site”. It was converted into flats in 2005–08.

The 2003 Bullring

The developers who finally did it were the Birmingham Alliance, formed in 1999 by Hammerson, Land Securities and Henderson Global Investors. Demolition of the 1964 centre, 65,000 tonnes of concrete, began on 20 June 2000 and was complete by March 2001. Archaeologists working on the site found evidence of the medieval town underneath.

The new Bullring, designed mainly by Benoy, opened on 4 September 2003. St Martin’s Church, the Rotunda and Moor Street station were cleaned and restored around it, and Nelson was set back close to his old site. The cost is usually given as about £500 million, though reports vary. Even the name was argued over; the compromise made the shopping centre “Bullring” and the place “Bull Ring”.

The building everyone noticed was Selfridges, by Future Systems (Jan Kaplický and Amanda Levete), clad in 15,000 aluminium discs on a deep blue skin. The architectural writer Wilson Yau, for the Twentieth Century Society, judged it “a memorable building that looks certain to outlast the timid and mundane shopping centre around it”.

Still a market

The markets moved to Edgbaston Street, next to St Martin’s. They are about to move again: in October 2025 Hammerson won consent to replace the Indoor Market with housing, with traders due to go to a new market in the Smithfield development.

So the Bull Ring has been cleared and rebuilt three times in two centuries, each time by people sure they were building for good. Through all of it, somebody has been selling fish and vegetables at the bottom of the hill.