Birmingham Building Stones Trails

 

Trail 3: Around the Shops continued


 
Emerging out of the linkway from the Bullring shopping centre, you have now reached the upper level of Grand Central Mall.

17. Grand Central & New Street Station
The building development which encompasses the remodelled New Street railway station and its enclosing shopping mall, Grand Central, opened in 2015. It was designed by architecture firm AZPML, headed up by Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Maider Llaguno (Mairs, 2015). Most of the structure is steel and plaster, with a tetrafluoroethylene plastic roof. Stones are used for paving and provide a feast for fossil spotters.

Grand Central and New Street Station concourse, with striped paving of Kobra and Royal White Granites.

Grand Central and New Street Station concourse, with striped paving of Kobra and Royal White Granites.

Two contrasting stones are used, Jura Marble and Nero Marquina. Jura Marble is not a true marble in the geological sense, but the term ‘marble’ has long been used in the building industry to describe any carbonate rocks which take a good polish, regardless of whether or not they have been metamorphosed. This stone is a nice example of a polished limestone. It is a readily available and relatively cheap stone, and is currently very popular, it can be seen in many shopping malls worldwide. It is derived from German Jura in Central Bavaria, in the Altmühltal National Park. The quarries lie near Eichstatt, about half way between Munich and Nuremberg. Jura Marble belongs to the Late Jurassic Treuchtlingen Formation (c.145Ma) and has many well preserved fossils; ammonoids and belemnites are very common, the belemnites are particularly well-preserved and dark brown in colour. The Treuchtlingen seas were dominated by sponge biostromes and fossils of these are very abundant in the rock, as mottled, brown, sometimes ring-shaped structures. These were colonized by millions of calcite-encrusted tubiphyte worms and these can be seen as millimeter-size white flecks throughout the rock.

Jura Marble. A belemnite and sponge fossils, surrounded by tubiphyte worm casts.

Jura Marble. A belemnite and sponge fossils, surrounded by tubiphyte worm casts.

A black Spanish limestone, marketed as Nero Marquina is also used here. This is Mid-Cretaceous in age (c.125Ma) and comes from Marquina, in the Basque country of NE Spain. Like the Jura Marble, it takes a mirror-like polish, much enhanced by the blackness of the stone. It is a bituminous limestone with a micritic matrix, but fossils are preserved as white and include fragments of rudist and other bivalves and corals. Also the formation was weakly deformed and evidence of this are excellent, conjugate sets of en echelon tension gashes, infilled with white calcite, along with other veins. Good examples of these are seen in the ‘island’ of Nero Marquina close to the entrance to the linkway to the Bullring, outside Costa Coffee.

Julie attempting the near impossible task of photographing the highly reflective surface of Nero Marquina.

Julie attempting the near impossible task of photographing the highly reflective surface of Nero Marquina.

En echelon tension gashes and rudist fossils in Nero Marquina limestone.

En echelon tension gashes and rudist fossils in Nero Marquina limestone.

Go down the escalator

Go down the escalator

Follow the upper concourse clockwise and go down the first escalator you come to, (on the right). Continue straight ahead to the Southside entrance.

18. Outside New Street
The main station concourse with its grey and white striped paving and the pedestrian areas around New Street and Grand Central have been designed by Atkins Landscape Architects 2015 with stone contractors, Hardscape. As is customary these days, cheap and hardwearing Chinese granites are used for paving, setts and kerbs.

Kobra Granite is used on the paving, steps, planters and benches (many of which double up as counter- terrorism blockades) around the exterior of the station. This is a dark grey, fine-grained micro-granodiorite, composed of plagioclase, quartz and hornblende. It is quarried near Changle in Fujian Province. Royal White Granite is also used for contrasting paving and kerbs. It is a pale grey granite, coarse grained and composed of white feldspars, grey quartz and biotite, streaked with very coarse-grained pegmatites (below). It is quarried from Puning in Guangdong Province to the south of Fujian. Both of these granites are associated with a Mesozoic continental arc complex which extends along the continental margins of SE China. Numerous series of granitoids were intruded into this region during the Cretaceous, between 130-80Ma. Several of these coastal range granites are quarried and shipped out of the port of Xiamen.

Royal White Granite. It is a pale grey granite, coarse grained and composed of white feldspars, grey quartz and biotite, streaked with very coarse-grained pegmatites.

Royal White Granite. It is a pale grey granite, coarse grained and composed of white feldspars, grey quartz and biotite, streaked with very coarse-grained pegmatites.

Follow the steps down for a final detour from the shopping malls around New Street Station. Cross over Station Street at the bottom of the steps, turn right to cross Hill Street then immediately left down Hill Street to the junction with Smallbrook Queensway. Cross Smallbrook Queensway and turn right, heading for Holloway Circus. This roundabout features a small park called Thomas Gardens, but is best known for the slightly unexpected landmark of a Chinese pagoda. The area can be accessed from the pedestrian subway ahead.

19. Holloway Circus
The pagoda stands as a gift to the City of Birmingham, presented in 1998 by the owner of a chain of Chinese supermarkets, Woon Wing Yip OBE. Chan (2005) interrogates the philosophy of this pagoda as a gift in an interesting article which explores both the concepts of gifting and multiculturalism, particularly in Birmingham at a time shortly after the return of Hong Kong to China by the British, leaving many Hong Kong citizens feeling stateless. Mr Wing Yip was inspired to donate the pagoda after discovering that Anthony Gormley’s Iron: Man in Victoria square had been a gift to the city from the Trustee Savings Bank in 1992. Pagodas are associated with Buddhist shrines in China, where they act as watchtowers, allowing a 360° view. Mr Wing Yip was very keen to point out that the pagoda should not be seen as a religious symbol, but it should be as a beacon on this busy gateway to the city centre.

Standing 40 ft high, the pagoda is constructed of Silver Grey Granite which was quarried and worked in Fujian, SE China, although samples of the stone were sent in advance of construction to the UK for testing their load-bearing strength at the Birmingham Industrial Research Laboratories. Silver Grey Granite is also known under the standard Chinese stone nomenclature G603. G standing for granite, and 6 represents the province of Fujian. This is a two-mica granite, with white feldspars and grey quartz. Like the stones seen around New Street station, this comes from one of the voluminous plutons intruded into the SE China continental margin, during the collision of a series of allochthonous terranes throughout the Mesozoic.

Holloway Circus and the pagoda.

Holloway Circus and the pagoda.

The surrounding gardens were originally planted with plants found in Fujian. A number of large boulders of granite and granite migmatite (a granite that has been suddenly frozen during the process of melting) are used as garden ornaments. The ‘Fu Dragons’ are of concrete.

This is the last page of Walk 3.

 

 

References:

 
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