The Ringway Centre, sweeping 230 metres along Birmingham’s inner ring road in one continuous curve, is a striking monument to the heroic age of the UK’s “motorway city”. It stands like a protective wall, its four floors of offices framed by horizontal bands of abstract concrete reliefs and slender vertical fins, punctuated by a staccato rhythm of Corbusian bullhorn lamps. The taut ribbon of offices projects out over the street, sheltering a long parade of shops, and leaps over a road supported on dramatic angled columns – compared by their architect, James Roberts, to “the massive feet of a Martian monster”.
Built in 1962, as highway fever was sweeping the city, the Ringway was the ultimate expression of “carchitecture”: a building designed to be taken in at speed. It fused the American strip mall, the British high street and the brave new world of inner city ring roads into what the Birmingham Pevsner architectural guide describes as “the best piece of mid-20th century urban design in the city”. It even served as the glamorous backdrop for a Clint Eastwood photoshoot when he visited the city in 1967, posing moodily on the balcony of the hotel across the street.
