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Selfridges' Birmingham. It has a reputation as a "rustbelt cripple," inhabited by "ruthlessly ironic, laconic and inherently nonchauvenistic" people, reports Warren Hodge in a New York Times article about Britain's second-largest city, Birmingham. Its "downtown tangle of freeways" is such a mess it's known as "Spaghetti Junction," and it has more lanes leaving the city than entering it. Even Prince Charles piles on when it comes to Birmingham. He says its downtown area has "no charm, no human scale, no character except arrogance." Takes one to know one? (sorry).
But all of that is changing now in Birmingham, and it's all because of a retailer. Selfridges, http://selfridgesbirmingham.com, has transformed "an old market area known as the Bull Ring," http://www.bullring.co.uk, by erecting a $65 million building, a "curvy, undulating structure with a glittering surface of 15,000 reflective aluminum discs on a sheer cobalt blue skin." It is "astonishing," according to the critics back in London, and "could do for Birmingham what Frank Gehry's Guggenheim museum did for Bilbao in Spain." The thing is, the Selfridges store, designed by a London firm called Future Systems, http://www.Future-Systems.com, is doing more than just adding a little razzle dazzle to Birmingham's "reputation for strangling life and commerce in a collar of brutalist concrete."
The Selfridges sensation is now drawing attention to the city's parks -- of which it has more than any other city in Britain. It has "more canals than Venice," too, which are no longer "filled with rusting bicycles" or providing escape routes for street criminals. Suddenly, people are noticing the "walkways and plazas" built over the past decade, the new Symphony Hall and the Balti Triangle, "a largely Pakistani area" with "more than 70 restaurants." Even a Times of London critic, Lucia van der Post, has to admit it's all pretty impressive. "All in all," she writes of the Selfridges store, "it makes a trip to Birmingham seem like the must-have treat of the year."
Tim Manners, editor
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