Like any great city, Birmingham is a restless, organic creation. Its latest revolution involves the unmaking of Madin - John Madin, the Modernist architect responsible for the city's uncompromising Central Library, hailed by some as a Brutalist masterpiece, reviled by others as a concrete monstrosity.
Whatever your view, the location dubbed Paradise Circus - where the library stood as a centrepiece and a counterpoint to the Victorian splendour of the Town Hall, the Council House and Art Gallery - has always seemed like something of an oxymoron. Paradise, it wasn't.
For one thing, the scheme was never completed to Madin's specification - the library should have been clad in Travertine marble, but when the money ran out in the early 70's it was left standing in all its naked concrete glory.
Plans to relocate the city's central bus station from Digbeth were also shelved, leaving a gloomy and sometimes threatening walkway linking the civic quarter to the more modern prospect of the Rep Theatre.
This dank precinct came to symbolise Birmingham's blundering town planning, and although it was later given something a makeover, it's transformation into a downmarket shopping mall did nothing to rouse the spirits. Only the dossers who slept rough in its more obscure corners will miss it.
So, to 2016, and the re-invention of the area - a scheme so vast that it's causing months of traffic diversions and delays in the city centre. Madin's library - with it's "inverted ziggurat" that made it look larger at the top than the bottom - is being swept away, along with all that surrounded it.
Paradise lost? Hardly.
The development that replaces it - according to images posted around the site - will shimmer with glass and steel, as new office blocks and retail units muscle in.
Only time will tell if this is Paradise Regained.
Whatever your view, the location dubbed Paradise Circus - where the library stood as a centrepiece and a counterpoint to the Victorian splendour of the Town Hall, the Council House and Art Gallery - has always seemed like something of an oxymoron. Paradise, it wasn't.
For one thing, the scheme was never completed to Madin's specification - the library should have been clad in Travertine marble, but when the money ran out in the early 70's it was left standing in all its naked concrete glory.
Plans to relocate the city's central bus station from Digbeth were also shelved, leaving a gloomy and sometimes threatening walkway linking the civic quarter to the more modern prospect of the Rep Theatre.
This dank precinct came to symbolise Birmingham's blundering town planning, and although it was later given something a makeover, it's transformation into a downmarket shopping mall did nothing to rouse the spirits. Only the dossers who slept rough in its more obscure corners will miss it.
So, to 2016, and the re-invention of the area - a scheme so vast that it's causing months of traffic diversions and delays in the city centre. Madin's library - with it's "inverted ziggurat" that made it look larger at the top than the bottom - is being swept away, along with all that surrounded it.
Paradise lost? Hardly.
The development that replaces it - according to images posted around the site - will shimmer with glass and steel, as new office blocks and retail units muscle in.
Only time will tell if this is Paradise Regained.
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