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.

Hutton Hall: Transfer and Transformation



Hutton Hall, June 2011

Hutton Hall has sat at the heart of the Hutton Estate in Washwood Heath for several decades. Initially a meeting venue for local tenants, it became a base for a variety of local groups and services, but latterly a target for graffiti and vandalism. A few years ago a local resident, Masood Yasin, approached Birmingham City Council to question the quality of what Hutton Hall was offering the local area and to propose a community-led regeneration of the building. To their credit City Council officers together with Business in the Community and the law firm Eversheds worked with the local organisation Masood Yasin now runs - Comm:Pact - on a bold initiative.

Since 1st April 2011 Hutton Hall has been transferred from the City Council to be managed by Comm:Pact on a 25 year lease. As can be seen from the photograph above compared to the one below taken in 2008 the exterior of the building has been transformed.

Hutton Hall, 2008

The art work now adorning the building was designed in conjunction with local residents to reflect Hutton Hall's Birmingham location, local heritage, the colours of the fabrics used in Asian fashion, the names of organisations working in the building and iconic images of contemporary life.

Hutton Hall, June 2011

In coming months Hutton Hall hopes to extend the activities currently on offer which include: twice weekly sewing classes organised by the women's group Amina; Zumba classes; a play scheme for children aged 6-11; and a weekly health project run by Kidney Research UK.

Given the age profile of the locality, strengthening services for young people is a priority. The sports court at the back provides the land, but as many organisations are asking at the moment: who will provide the financial and human resources?



Traces of the Past (I)



Number 323 Alum Rock Road

Changing a shop sign can be an act of temporary urban archaeology by peeling away several layers of the recent past. Number 323 Alum Rock Road currently bears witness to everyday life in the 1940s: “tobacconist, confectioner, fancy goods”. The antique italics spell out “H.A. Porter” - Horace Aubrey Porter - whose store was first listed in the 1943 edition of Kelly’s Directory. This annual publication was the Google Maps of the analogue age, which tried to document all the addresses in the city. The listing remained as H.A. Porter for a further twenty-five years until it changed to R.J. Porter in the 1968 edition.



Goodbye Mr News



Mr Champaneria

The true value of things emerges when they are no more - something as true of places as of people.

Seeing the Crown Buildings wrapped around the corner of Washwood Heath and Alum Rock Road at Saltley Gate up for auction prompted me to use a blog to capture social change and everyday life in the Alum Rock area of East Birmingham.

The last tenant to vacate one of the eleven premises up for sale was also one of the long-standing reference points that defines any neighbourhood. The owner of “Mr News”, Hasmukh Champaneria, retired at the end of February 2011 after more than thirty years as a newsagent at Saltley Gate.

Born in Gujarat, India, Mr Champaneria came to England in 1975 and worked for several years in the Black Country before deciding to open a business.
In 1980 prior to the demolition of the Gate pub and adjacent stores to make way for the large roundabout,  Mr Champaneria took over an existing newsagents at Number 14 Washwood Heath Road and renamed it “Geeta News” after his wife.

Mr Champaneria explains how the business developed in the 1980s:

“Customer communication is more important than anything else. Business is only how you talk, how you give service to people. People come, they don’t care too much about money, service is important. I’ve always been a talking person, I’ll talk anything with customers, sports, whatever, I will talk with customers, make more friendliness with people. Word is always passed on. If you give good service, if you come into my shop once and find there is a warm welcome in here, you will say, ‘This chap is very nice, why not stop here next time?’ and that’s why the business built.”

With several large factories still operating nearby in the 1980s Geeta News opened at 5 a.m. every day – “customers knew I would be there at 5 o’clock and they would always be waiting for me”.

When the Washwood Heath Road properties were demolished to widen the road Mr Champaneria was determined to stay in the area:

“The business was doing well. Also you were getting on with the community as well. Society accepted me, so once your name’s there, you are established, and your business will be stable. I was looking for somewhere in any empty property in Alum Rock Road”.

The change of location to Number 4 Alum Rock Road in October 1989 brought a change of name:



Number 4 Alum Rock Road

“The thinking was a different image, rather than ‘Geeta News’, ‘Mr News’, something which when you go to the High Street, something which attracts people. People know and say ‘Mr News’.”.

In the last few months of Mr News’s existence I was able to see at first hand the three things this apparently ordinary newsagents offered the Alum Rock Road:

First, Mr Champaneria was not only a source of newspapers, sweets and cigarettes. More than most businesses a newsagents both responds to and shapes the rhythms of local life. For several decades Mr News witnessed the modest addictions, compulsions, little rewards, political views, consumer desires and global connections sustained by what we purchase in newsagents. His was a familiar face whose friendly demeanour defused many a row and often mediated between the different generations and diverse cultural backgrounds of the area. As Mr Champaneria remarked:

“I used to explain to the parents – ‘Your children have changed, you have to change your ways, you have to change to modern life, you can’t always do things in your way, you have to loose, you have to loosen your grip, give freedoms’. But whatever freedom, don’t abuse it, so when the children came to talk with me, I always said, ‘Parents give you freedom, you should respect it. If you do something wrong, your parents tell somebody else, you’re damaging other children’s lives. So if you have the freedom, accept the freedom, don’t do anything wrong’ ”.

Second, for many years the store was a trusted Western Union money transfer station. Dozens of people a week would come from all over Birmingham to send money to the Caribbean and Africa in particular. The corner of Alum Rock Road was linked to Jamaica, St Kitts, Nevis, Nigeria, Zambia, Ghana, Senegal as well as Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Third, even for those who’d grown up in Alum Rock but moved away, Mr News’s continued presence offered a reassurance that part of their childhood remained:

“No matter how far away they went, they always came. I had some customers 30 years, they come themselves, their children came as well, and when I finished the last day, they said Goodbye, and they said they don’t think they will come on this road again, so you can see how communication is there. People came until the last day of my shop”.


Mr News prior to closure

Now Mr News is no more the residents of Alum Rock realise how important it was, particularly when they seek out lottery tickets or reliable money transfer services. Mr Champaneria himself experienced this sense of loss on the day he travelled to meet me:

“Even today, I came [to the Alum Rock Road] at 11 o’clock, everybody talking, everybody asking, ‘Where have you moved to?’, even one Afro-Caribbean woman stopped me and said ‘Where have you moved to? I’ve been looking for you’, I said, ‘I’ve not moved anywhere’. And she said, ‘I miss your shop, it doesn’t matter what you say’. It made me cry, if the people are like that, it makes me cry, yes, society, they did accept me”.

He has hopes for the future of the area:

"I think the area is still brilliant. It could improve more, if the City Council made some sort of change round. They should look at putting out a new image for the area. I have prayed to God that some developer buys the Crown Buildings, and brings a different image, and different way to the building, it will bring people in".