We take a look back down memory lane to 1965, now 60 years ago. The city was emerging in a mass of concrete as buildings and roads were popping up just about everywhere.
Brutalist architect John Madin had designed the Birmingham Post and Mail tower in Colmore Circus with the paper moving out of cramped offices in New Street. The new building was opened by Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon and Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon on 26th October 1965.
The Inner Ring Road with the new Albany Hotel was unveiled in March along with the completed second stage of the Nechells Green Parkway which was pictured on January 25, 1965. Queen Elizabeth II made a tour round the Bull Ring, although her husband Prince Philip had opened the centre the year earlier.
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Fumes filled the Midland Red bus depot in the Bull Ring and as I remember as a kid, this was always a somewhat scary place with buses and smoke everywhere. Coal was still being dug from Hamstead Colliery for the last time as the pit closed this year after opening in 1898.
A real turning year for the whole region as ‘the new clashed with old’. It was a brave new world to contend with in Birmingham.