Qualla: Broad Street, Birmingham

Broad Street, Birmingham: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Five young men from Birmingham walked into a basement club on Broad Street in 1978 and started rehearsing. The club had restyled itself after Studio 54 in New York and the Blitz in London, all neon and mirrors and bad ideas, and the band that practised there was about to be called Duran Duran. The Rum Runner is gone now, demolished in 1987 to make way for a Hyatt. But that period, when a suburban high street accidentally became one of British music's launchpads, set the template for what Broad Street has tried to be ever since: a place that wants to be other places, louder than it actually is.

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Image: Public domain

Broad Street, Birmingham: From a Country Path to a Banker's Address

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elliott Brown from Birmingham, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0. Broad Street did not start broad. In the 1750s it was a country path running across Easy Hill from what is now Victoria Square out toward Five Ways and on to Stourbridge. Then John Baskerville built his house here, the printer and typeface designer whose work still appears in Pen...

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Image: Elliott Brown from Birmingham, United Kingdom | CC BY-SA 2.0

Broad Street, Birmingham: The Decade That Changed Everything

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elliott Brown from Birmingham, United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0. Through the 1970s and most of the 1980s, Broad Street remained a quiet stretch of offices, churches, and the occasional pub. The International Convention Centre changed that. It opened in 1991 on the site where Bingley Hall had stood until fire took the hall in 1984, and it broug...

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Image: Elliott Brown from Birmingham, United Kingdom | CC BY 2.0

Broad Street, Birmingham: Black Sabbath Bridge

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oosoom at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. All four members of Black Sabbath grew up within a few miles of this street. Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, Bill Ward, and Ozzy Osbourne built the sound that would name a genre out of factory racket, Birmingham accents, and Iommi's missing fingertips. In 2019 the bridge across the Bi...

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Image: Oosoom at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Broad Street, Birmingham: The Last of the Old Buildings

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dr Graham Beards, CC BY-SA 4.0. Most of what made nineteenth-century Broad Street was knocked down across the twentieth. The Unitarian Church of the Messiah, the Roman Catholic St Peter's, the Anglican Immanuel Church, the Masonic Hall that became Central Television studios before being demolished in 2008. The ...

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Image: Dr Graham Beards | CC BY-SA 4.0

Broad Street, Birmingham: Trams Down the Middle

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Smuconlaw, CC BY-SA 4.0. Between 2015 and 2019 the West Midlands Metro extended along Broad Street to Five Ways, with stops at Library, Brindleyplace, and Five Ways. The tracks now run down what was once a country path, then a Georgian residential row, then an industrial fringe, then a banking district, ...

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Image: Smuconlaw | CC BY-SA 4.0