Birmingham Building Stones Trails

 

Trail 3: Around the Shops continued


 
Continue through the Wesleyan Building precinct then cross the tramway over Colmore Circus Queensway to the imposing building across the road.

Colmore Gate to 8 Colmore Row

Colmore Gate to 8 Colmore Row

9. Colmore Gate to 8 Colmore Row
On the corner of Bull Street and Colmore Row stands Colmore Gate, a fourteen-storey tower with office and retail space designed by Seymour Harris Partnership and built between 1990-92. It is almost entirely clad in Norwegian Blue Pearl Larvikite as described earlier at 61-63 Temple Row. The shimmering schillerescence of the oligoclase perthite feldspars are clearly observed on these polished surfaces.

Walk 50m along Colmore Row, noting the new paving underfoot (2022). This closely matches the paving from China around the Town Hall and Chamberlain Square (2020 – 2021), most likely from Fujian Province (see Trail 1). Turn left into the Great Western Arcade and continue walking through the arcade to the entrance on Temple Row.

10. Great Western Arcade
The Arcade is one of the last surviving examples of Birmingham’s Victorian shopping arcades. It was constructed in 1876, designed by architect W.H. Ward and built over the tracks of the railway lines coming out of Snow Hill station. It underwent refurbishment and restoration in the 1980s by Douglas Hickman of the John Madin Design Group. The façade to the entrance on Temple Row, is in a Renaissance style, with carved pilasters, capitals, and figures personifying Art and Industry above the arch. All of this is carved in Bath Stone freestone. One of the UK’s most famous building stones, Bath Stone is quarried around the eponymous city from the Oxfordian Chalfield Oolite Formation, part of the Jurassic Great Oolite Group. As the name suggests, it is an oolitic limestone, but it also contains variable amounts of shell debris. Bath Stone can be distinguished from Portland Stone in that it is a pale golden-yellow colour.
Great Western Arcade

The Great Western Arcade

Bath Stone

Bath Stone, oolitic limestone detail, Great Western Arcade

From The Great Western Arcade, cross Temple Row and continue through the North Western Arcade back onto Corporation Street. If this arcade is closed (i.e. on a Sunday), then turn right out of the Great Western Arcade onto Temple Row, turn left at Cherry Street and take that route back onto Corporation Street. Turn right onto Corporation Street and then left at Union Street. Our route is now to take us through the shopping malls at the heart of Birmingham’s 21st Century shopping district.

Carrara Marble

Carrara Marble at the former WH Smith

Carrara Marble

Carrara Marble in Union Street.

11. Corner of Union Street and Union Passage (Formerly WH Smith)
Whilst walking down Union Street, it’s worth stopping here to look at the Carrara Marble cladding on the exterior. A wide variety of marbles are quarried from this nappe stack of Mesozoic limestones exposed in the Massa and Carrara regions of coastal Tuscany in Italy. The variety seen here is a variety known as Arabescato Marble, essentially it is a tectonic breccia, formed along a thrust plane, that was subsequently deformed and metamorphosed during the emplacement of the carbonate Tuscan Nappes in the Oligocene and Miocene. This is a calcite marble, metamorphosed at greenschist facies. The grey matrix is rich in very fine grained iron pyrite.

Continue to the end of Union Street, turn right on High Street and head towards Rotunda Square at the entrance to the Bullring. Next door to Waterstones bookshop is the Nationwide Building Society.

12. Nationwide Building Society
The façade of this bank is clad in panels of a greenish grey gneiss, unfortunately of unknown origin. It is clearly a banded, metamorphic rock at greenschist facies. Mineralogically the green colour is almost certainly imparted by chlorite, and tiny, needle-like crystals of actinolite are visible. Muscovite is also present, but the overall surface sheen of this rock suggests that it is also rich in carbonate minerals. Making this most probably a calc-silicate gneiss, derived from the complex metamorphism of a sequence of clastic and carbonate sediments.

Nationwide Building Society

Nationwide Building Society

13. Rotunda
The 24-storey high Rotunda is probably one of the most iconic buildings of the Bullring and Birmingham and became listed in 2000. Completed in 1965 by architect James Roberts, it is the only survivor of the 1960s Bull Ring Centre. The street level is clad, mosaic-like, with brick shaped blocks of white Carrara Marble. These have a naturally broken surface which does catch the light well and makes for an interesting texture. This variety is white with faint, grey streaks, it is known as Carrara ‘Sicilian’ Marble (the links with Sicily are unknown and probably tenuous). Similarly to the Arabescato variety described on Union Street (above), this marble is derived from the Apulian Tectonic Window during earth movements around 30Ma.
The Rotunda - street level Carrara marble cladding

The Rotunda – street level Carrara marble cladding

Walk 3 continues on the next page…

 

 

References can be found on the last page of the walk (3.5).