Qualla: Bull Ring, Birmingham

Bull Ring, Birmingham: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. On the day Birmingham's new Bullring opened, 4 September 2003, 276,600 people walked through its doors. The first year drew 36.5 million. None of them came to see a bull tied to a hoop of iron, which is where the name comes from: in the medieval green at the centre of the corn market, livestock were tethered for baiting before slaughter. The hoop is long gone. The corn market is long gone. The slope down to St Martin's Church remains, the same fifteen metres of sandstone ridge that medieval traders climbed with their pack-horses, and underneath it all is a market that has been here for over eight hundred and seventy years.

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Bull Ring, Birmingham: Royal Charter, 1154

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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...

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Image: N Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bull Ring, Birmingham: The Concrete Decade

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daniel from Glasgow, United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0. 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 s...

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Image: Daniel from Glasgow, United Kingdom | CC BY 2.0

Bull Ring, Birmingham: Selfridges in Sequins

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit G-Man, Public domain. 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...

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Image: G-Man | Public domain

Bull Ring, Birmingham: The Bull, The Admiral, The Sculptor's Footprint

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oosoom at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 S...

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

Bull Ring, Birmingham: Why People Keep Coming

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit West Midlands Police from West Midlands, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0. 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 ...

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Image: West Midlands Police from West Midlands, United Kingdom | CC BY-SA 2.0