Peter de Bermingham, a local landowner, walked away from the court of King Henry II in 1154 with a Charter of Marketing Rights. Birmingham itself was nothing then, a small settlement on a ridge between the Tame and the Cole, with no obvious reason to become important. The charter was the obvious reason. By 1232 a document mentions one merchant in business with William de Bermingham, with weavers, a smith, a tailor, and a purveyor working under him. A leading market town by mid-century. The area was called Corn Cheaping at first. Then 'the Bulrynge' in a sixteenth-century survey. Then Mercer Street, after the cloth traders. Then Spicer Street, then Spiceal Street, as the cloth trade gave way to grocery and meat. The names changed; the trading did not stop.

By 1964 Britain wanted to be modern. The Birmingham Bull Ring Centre that opened that year had 140 shop units across 350,000 square feet, 19 escalators, 40 lifts, 96 public doors, and six miles of air ducting. The Queen herself came to visit. It was the first indoor city-centre shopping mall in the United Kingdom, and within a decade it was a national punchline. The brutalist boxes sat marooned between ring roads, accessible only through pedestrian subways that the public refused to use. The escalators broke. The rents drove out the traders. The Rotunda, designed by James A. Roberts to be twenty-five storeys with a revolving rooftop restaurant, never got the restaurant, though the mechanism for the rotation is still inside it. Urban Splash converted the tower into apartments in the 2000s. The 1960s shopping centre itself was demolished starting in 2000. Trewin Copplestone's four bull-ring murals, which had decorated the outside walls, were lost; Historic England put them on a 2015 list of vanished public artworks.

The new Bullring opened on a problem. A major road and two railway tunnels run under the northern edge of the site, which is why two whole levels of shops dangle from four arched steel trusses, each forty-five metres long and weighing 120 tonnes, piled on either side of the rails. The architectural set piece is Selfridges, the four-storey department store at the eastern corner clad in fifteen thousand aluminium discs. Future Systems designed it. The inspiration, according to the firm, came from a Paco Rabanne sequinned dress. The Rough Guide to Britain called it 'reminiscent of an inside-out octopus.' A 2008 poll voted it the ugliest building in the country. None of these descriptions are wrong. The store cost sixty million pounds, covers 25,000 square metres, and now ranks among the most-photographed pieces of architecture in the Midlands.

Two metres of bronze stand at the western entrance: Laurence Broderick's bull, formally titled The Guardian, informally just The Bull, locally proposed as Brummie. Vandalised in 2005 and again in 2006, repaired and returned to its plinth both times. Looking out over St Martin's Square is a far older figure - the bronze of Horatio Nelson, sculpted by Richard Westmacott and unveiled on 25 October 1809 for George III's Golden Jubilee. It was the first public monument in Birmingham and the first figurative memorial to Nelson erected anywhere in Great Britain, beaten only by one in Montreal. The current Portland stone plinth dates from 1960, after the marble base was damaged in a 1958 move. The Birmingham Civic Society had to campaign for years before the railings were restored in 2005, for the bicentenary of Trafalgar.

Strip away the architecture and the controversy and the bronze, and what is left is what has always been here: an enormous market on a slope. Spiceal Street reopened in 2011 with a strip of restaurants set under a ribbon-effect roof of glass, wood, and aluminium, replacing among other things the Spiral Cafe designed by Marks Barfield Architects, a small Costa Coffee whose shell-shaped roof had been inspired by Fibonacci's spiral. Jamie's Italian opened, went bust in 2019. Handmade Burger Co opened, went bust eight months later. Vietnamese Street Kitchen took the space. The names rotate. The crowd does not. There is something underneath the brand changes and the architectural prizes and the demolitions that is just the same instinct that brought traders here in 1154: this is a good slope, with a church at the bottom, and people will always come to buy and sell.