Old buildings are not as important as people having places to live
Objections to ripping down an art deco cinema in Birmingham are understandable, but if we want our cities to have vibrant art scenes, we need strong economies to support them, says Will Cooling
It’s easy to forget that the most important letter in Nimby is the M. Arguments about degrowth, city centre living or suburban chauvinism may make for stimulating intellectual debates, but typically planning battles are about people who already live in an area not wanting to see their surroundings change, especially to the benefit of strangers.
It’s important to remember this because it helps keep us Yimbys honest. It is easy to advocate for development in the abstract only to instinctively recoil from seeing an area you care about change.
There are the beginnings of a debate in Birmingham about redeveloping a back street by the Grand Central railway station. Rumours abound about a developer wanting to build a 50-storey block of flats, and local opponents are already mobilising. Their demand is for the local authorities to declare the whole area a site of cultural significance due to its long-established repertory theatre, independent cinema and rock pub. In just two weeks, over 18,000 people have signed the petition in support of such a designation.
And when I first saw the petition, I very nearly became one of those thousands. I have fond memories of spending many evenings and weekends attending special screenings and festivals at the Electric Cinema when I lived in Birmingham. On a very personal level it would be sad to not just see the cinema close, but a genuinely distinctive building be knocked down too.
But then, I thought about things for a few minutes, and realised my sadness at the closure of cinema I’ve not attended in over a decade isn’t as important as people having somewhere to live. And that is particularly true when you consider that Old Station Street is the perfect location for city centre apartments. Being right next to Grand Central means that ultimately it will be right next to high speed railways that would make such flats genuine options for people who work not just in Birmingham but also in Nottingham and London. Whether you call it effective urbanism or philistinism doesn’t change the fact that this street would be better served by becoming a block of apartments, than being a centre for arts and culture.
But beyond that, I would urge people who share my affection for the Electric Cinema, or for old buildings more generally, to look again at the objects of our affection. The Electric Cinema is indeed a gorgeous looking building on the outside, but inside it was incredibly cramped. That meant it only had two screens and couldn’t maintain a proper café, which restricted revenue, but it also meant that the building was inaccessible with no lift to the upstairs screening room. Modern facilities may not have the art deco cool or dingy charm of the Electric Cinema, but equally they wouldn’t require wheelchair users to crawl up two flights of stairs to watch Vincent Price in Witchfinder General.
Of course, the objection will be that such modern facilities aren’t being built, especially in a city like Birmingham where the council is currently making savage cuts to save itself from bankruptcy.
And this should give Sir Keir Starmer pause when he says that planning reform is an alternative to increased public spending; often development opportunities require public investment to be unlocked. But part of the way cities afford civic amenities such as cool cinemas or interesting rock pubs is by being prosperous. It is not a coincidence that the Electric Cinema was built at a point when Birmingham was a thriving industrial centre.
The only sustainable way for Birmingham to have a vibrant arts and culture scene that everyone can enjoy is for it to be an economically strong city. And that will only happen if it stops clinging to the past and starts building.