REGIONAL FOCUS
Birmingham, at the heart of the Midlands, is undergoing a huge amount of city centre regeneration. PSE caught up with council leaderMike Whitby to discuss his vision for the future.
B
ritain’s second city – a title Birmingham once held unchallenged,
but which it now has to fi ght for with its northerly rivals Manchester and Glasgow – is reinventing itself.
The showpiece project of plans to rebuild Birmingham’s city centre for the future is rail. High-speed rail is on the way, destined to arrive at a terminus in the heart of regen- erated Eastside. The bustling New Street station is also undergoing a huge rebuild.
New Street will have three-and-a-half times more space for passengers in a “giant, light- fi lled atrium” with brighter platforms and a “stunning” new exterior, all completed by 2015. The regeneration promises to recon- nect the city’s north and south sides. The new station concourse, being constructed in a former car park next to the station, will
24 | public sector executive Mar/Apr 11
be opened by 2012, after which the existing station concourse will be completely rede- veloped over the next three years.
Birmingham is both a shopping and trans- port hub for a large swathe of the Midlands, so it seems fi tting that the city’s newest deal incorporates both.
Public Sector Executive caught up with the leader of the city council, Mike Whitby, just as John Lewis announced it was building its fi rst new department store for six years in Birmingham as part of the New Street station Gateway redevelopment project.
He said: “It’s a remarkable coup for the city of Birmingham. It completes the fi nal jigsaw in our retail offering. Andy Street, the chief executive of the John Lewis Partnership, has said that this now makes
us the pre-eminent shopping and retail package outside of London, and dare I say it, occasionally, we’re being voted as almost as appealing as London.
“It’s added a tremendous amount of gravitas to our reputation. We’re already upgrading the station, Network Rail’s Gateway project, which will mean it will ac- commodate 52 million people a year, and that’s now under-pinned by one of the most prestigious companies in the country as its fi rst tenant. We are now going to redevelop The Pallasades shopping centre above the station, and you couldn’t have a better an- chor tenant than John Lewis Partnership, you really couldn’t.”
John Lewis didn’t make its decision on a whim, Whitby said – it required years of negotiation.
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