Qualla: Grand Central, Birmingham

Grand Central, Birmingham: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sunil060902, CC BY-SA 4.0. Most British shopping centres do not change their names. Most do not get torn open while trains continue to run underneath them. Grand Central has done both. When it opened in 1971 it was called the Birmingham Shopping Centre, a brutalist slab sitting on top of the rebuilt New Street Station. In 1988 someone decided it needed a more aspirational identity and renamed it the Pallasades. By the 2010s the Pallasades had become a byword for tired retail, the kind of place that local newspapers wrote about with the word grim. In 2014 Birmingham gutted it. When it reopened in September 2015 as Grand Central, the centrepiece was a soaring transparent atrium roof, and the trains underneath had never stopped.

Image: Sunil060902 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Grand Central, Birmingham: The third time around

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bs0u10e01, CC BY-SA 4.0. The original 1971 building came at the end of a long Birmingham reinvention. The Victorian New Street Station had been demolished in the late 1960s and replaced with a station and shopping deck designed in the spirit of Le Corbusier and the Smithsons. The shopping deck became the...

Image: Bs0u10e01 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Grand Central, Birmingham: The ETFE roof

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BristolIcarus, CC BY-SA 4.0. The defining feature of the new centre is the atrium ceiling, a Texlon pillow membrane made of ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, a fluorinated polymer better known by its abbreviation ETFE. The same material covers the Beijing Aquatics Centre, the Eden Project domes in Cornwall, and ...

Image: BristolIcarus | CC BY-SA 4.0

Grand Central, Birmingham: John Lewis leaves, Hollywood arrives

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Deryck Chan, CC BY-SA 4.0. Hammerson and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board bought Grand Central from Birmingham City Council in January 2016 for 335 million pounds, packaging it with the neighbouring Bullring as the United Kingdom's largest city-centre shopping destination, branded Bullring and Gran...

Image: Deryck Chan | CC BY-SA 4.0