Qualla: New Street, Birmingham

New Street, Birmingham: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. The street is recorded for the first time in 1296, written in the borough rentals as novus vicus. New Way. It probably opened in 1166 to give the de Birmingham family a direct route from their new market at the Bull Ring to their feudal overlords' stronghold at Dudley Castle. Eight and a half centuries later, the same line of paving stones runs from Victoria Square to the Bullring shopping centre, more or less pedestrianised, lined with Boots and Pret a Manger and the occasional surviving Victorian facade. The street has carried every kind of traffic a city can produce. It has also carried a great deal of grief.

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Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0

New Street, Birmingham: The Bond Street of the Midlands

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Graham Beards, CC BY-SA 4.0. In an 1840s guide written shortly after the completion of Birmingham Town Hall, a visitor called New Street the Bond Street of Birmingham, citing its glittering array of shops, its inns, its fine Elizabethan school, its theatre, and its post office. The phrase stuck. The school w...

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Image: Graham Beards | CC BY-SA 4.0

New Street, Birmingham: 21 November 1974

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathan Billinger, CC BY-SA 2.0. Two pubs on New Street were full on a Thursday evening, the Mulberry Bush inside King Edward House and the Tavern in the Town under the Rotunda. The Provisional IRA detonated bombs in both. Twenty-one people died and 182 were injured, most of them young men and women out for a dr...

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Image: Jonathan Billinger | CC BY-SA 2.0

New Street, Birmingham: Rivers of Blood

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mutney, CC BY-SA 4.0. At the corner of New Street and Stephenson Street stands a Victorian building that for decades was the Midland Bank, designed by Edward Holmes between 1867 and 1869. It is now an Apple Store. On 20 April 1968, in an upstairs room of what was then the Midland Hotel, the Conservati...

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Image: Mutney | CC BY-SA 4.0

New Street, Birmingham: What the Street Looks Like Now

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anneli Salo, CC BY-SA 3.0. Antony Gormley's Iron: Man stands at the western end, a six-metre cast-iron figure leaning at a slight tilt, installed in 1993 in Victoria Square. The Town Hall behind it is a Hellenistic temple in Anglesey limestone, opened in 1834. At the eastern end, the Bull Ring shopping cen...

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Image: Anneli Salo | CC BY-SA 3.0

New Street, Birmingham: The Station Below

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit andrewrabbott, CC BY-SA 4.0. Birmingham New Street is the name of one of Britain's busiest railway stations, but the station has never had direct access to the street that named it. Passengers reach it via Stephenson Place or, since 2015, through the new Grand Central shopping complex built above the redevel...

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Image: andrewrabbott | CC BY-SA 4.0