Crowning Glory?

The Crown Buildings at the corner of Alum Rock Road and Washwood Heath Road are more than the gateway to Alum Rock. Their condition is an easy to read barometer of the area's vitality. With their failure to reach the guide price of £1.3 to £1.5 million at the May 2011 auction, the future of the eleven vacant units is unclear.   



Still for sale

As of July 2011 the agents acting for the estate that has been selling its remaining Alum Rock properties indicated that the units are now likely to be sold individually. Indeed one of the end properties on Alum Rock Road was purchased at auction in May 2011 and the new owner is applying for the property to become a takeaway (there are so few already).

The end property of the block on Washwood Heath Road has been a solicitors since 2002 and is not part of any future sale.

19 Washwood Heath Road

Despite their aged, neglected facades the Crown Buildings retain a little of the late nineteenth century grandeur of the Victorian era. The empty units have also housed significant institutions in the area’s history. Straddling the corner, the Law Centre grew out of the Saltley Action Centre – a radical community project and drop-in centre - part of the heady conjunction of local activism and the government funded Community Development Project in the 1970s. Before they are sold off to restaurants, retail and whatever passes for twenty-first century regeneration we should mark the traces of a more radical recent past.

The Saltley Print and Media Workshop (SPAM) on Washwood Heath Road housed printers which produced among other things screen-printed T-shirts, posters for gigs and publishing gems like Our Area, the collection of poems by local children compiled for the Saltley Festival of 1979.

Next door the signs for the Bangladesh Workers Association and the Mirpur Elders Centre signal the journeys from South Asian villages to East Birmingham factories, terraced houses and latterly endless card games amidst satellite television.

Although the City Council's Regeneration Framework for Washwood Heath identifies the Crown Buildings as a development opportunity, the failure of the units to reach the guide price and their likely piecemeal sale in the coming months may prevent a more imaginative reconstruction of their former glories.

As a former occupant pointed out the Crown Buildings make a statement about the area to residents and visitors alike. They are one sensitive restoration project away from giving Alum Rock the high quality gateway that would signal a fresh start.

The 'Other' Alum Rock



An area with a reputation for crime, drugs and gangs, populated mostly by one migrant community. A familiar description of Alum Rock – except this is not Alum Rock, Birmingham B8, but Alum Rock, San Jose, CA 95127.

Anyone who types “Alum Rock” into Google or YouTube quickly encounters this “other” Alum Rock of cycling in Alum Rock Park and basketball at the Alum Rock Youth Center 

I was able to visit the Californian Alum Rock in August 2009. A ninety minute journey on the pleasingly clangy Cal Train south of San Francisco through Silicon Valley took me to San Jose. Two bus rides later I was walking along Alum Rock Avenue, the broad seven mile thoroughfare from the city of San Jose to the foothills of Alum Rock Park.

At first glance the setting could not be more different from the Alum Rock Road in Birmingham: the hills of the park overlook a quiet shopping parade with a Starbucks at the intersection:

and further along White Avenue the five million pound Alum Rock Youth Center with its highly polished sports hall and play activities:

Yet the two Alum Rocks have more in common than at first sight: in California like in Birmingham one ethnic community predominates: 71% of the population of 15,000 are Hispanic. Local residents of the San Jose Alum Rock told me “you don’t want to live here”, “there’s a lot of gangs”. A few days after my visit a young woman was murdered at the Alum Rock transit station from which I’d caught my bus.

Yet like in Birmingham, community organisations attempt to bring shape and structure to everyday life. The Californian Alum Rock has a traders' association and a a Methodist church. 

As with Naseby Centre in Alum Rock, the Alum Rock Youth Center has faced the prospect of closure.

This unexpected connection between two Alum Rocks five thousand miles apart offers opportunities. How enriching and fascinating if the two communities could be ‘twinned’ in some way, with both online and face to face connections, one day perhaps exchange visits.

I now know the way to San Jose, many more from East Birmingham should have the chance to follow.