How the reuse-and-repurpose mission is revitalising the ‘workshop of the world’ – a historic UK heartland of industry – and helping it thrive into the future
Far from a single-driver story, Birmingham and the wider Midlands’ recent growth spurt is a tale of convergence, and its increased credibility and success has been achieved through a variety of placemaking initiatives undertaken to improve image and clout.
The region has also made the most of its natural features to help fulfil its economic, cultural, and social potential. Its connectivity and central positioning have served as a quiet superpower, while its history of being baselessly underestimated has resulted in a valuable collective resilience. Its lower age demographic, compared to other major UK cities, has been reflected in a sense of vitality and a thriving culture. This includes scene-defining music, both elite and everyday sport, art inspired by labour and the region’s manufacturing DNA, as well as a booming food scene influenced by the city’s proudly diverse heritage and garnering a plethora of Michelin stars.
Now perceived much less peripherally, the Midlands today can be seen as a testing ground for the UK’s future.
This page, clockwise from top left: Birmingham Town Hall, Birmingham University, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (photo: James Cheadle), Birmingham Symphony Hall (photo: Jack Hobhouse)
When Hoare Lea was founded in Birmingham over 160 years ago, things were different – the engines of ingenuity were literally engines – but the industrial legacy left over from that time is still a major asset today. With embodied carbon increasingly part of the story, and the ‘reuse over replacement’ narrative aligning practical necessity with cultural meaning, the city’s system of sheds and warehouses, interweaved among more miles of canal than there are in Venice, are of real benefit.
Industrial spaces with built-in flexibility lend themselves to change of use, particularly as affordable entry points for culture and enterprise. Structurally tough, spacious and embedded in existing street patterns, they allow for continuity of identity, regeneration without erasure, and a sense of lived-in heritage. Those canals, created with practicality in mind, also accommodate human-scale connectivity and provide low-stress streams of everyday movement, around which social and mixed-use neighbourhoods can spring up. What once supported trade and manufacturing now underpins adaptability, cultural vitality and economic durability in ways many cities struggle to replicate.
Since 1862, we’ve helped shape the city into what it is today, from our founder Henry Lea installing the first electrical lighting systems in a public building at Birmingham Town Hall, which we would eventually work on a second time to modernise it from its original form. Much more recently we’ve had a hand in the low-carbon reinterpretation of Birmingham Botanical Gardens, redeveloped the Alexander Stadium for the 2022 Commonwealth Games, and worked with Julian Lloyd Webber and Birmingham City University on the world-class, purpose-built Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.
With our city-centre relocation in 2024 to a modern workplace created in an old billiards building in the Colmore District on Edmund Street, we’re able to see first hand how the city and region goes from strength to strength; enjoying a new lease of life in its contemporary iteration. It’s still an industrial heartland, just in the more modern sense.
Peaky Blinders and Silent Witness, filmed locally (photos: BBC Pictures)
Fame and fortune – fuelling change
“Peaky Blinders, Silent Witness, MasterChef: when we walk around Birmingham these days, we often see filming taking place,” says Luke Blyth, Director at Hoare Lea. “Whether it’s spotting the TV and film cameras filming the next epic, or the cultural murals of Black Sabbath and the Shelby brothers, you’re always reminded of the impact that art has on the city and what we should be encouraging to add real value to the area.”
As one of the BBC and Netflix’s most internationally successful UK dramas, Peaky Blinders fixed Birmingham in the cultural imagination on a global scale. The 2026 feature film The Immortal Man extended the show’s reach again, using Digbeth’s Loc. Studios as its primary production base and premiering at Symphony Hall to tie the film back to its home.
Founded by Steven Knight in 2024, Loc. Studios was the first major purpose-built film and TV studio of its scale in Birmingham, creating hundreds of jobs, directly projecting millions into local economy, more indirectly influencing growth through film-location tourism, and helping Birmingham reposition as a real, characterful alternative to London-centric production; a screen ecosystem rather than a one-show town. It converted thousands of square feet of former industrial building space, layering contemporary creativity onto historic fabric while refraining from sanitising the original Victorian buildings’ grit. It demonstrated regeneration in an authentic way that resonated with the people of Birmingham.
Peaky Blinders, Silent Witness, MasterChef: when we walk around Birmingham these days, we often see filming taking place. Whether it’s spotting the TV and film cameras filming the next epic, or the cultural murals of Black Sabbath and the Shelby brothers, you’re always reminded of the impact that art has on the city and what we should be encouraging to add real value to the area.
Luke Blyth
Director, Hoare Lea
Image courtesy of Stoford
Spill the tea
A world-class BBC headquarters is also due to open next year. On a four-decades derelict site that opened 100 years ago and operated as a tea factory into the 1980s, it will bring the building back to life for the next 100 years.
An expansive brick warehouse occupying a full city block just south of the HS2 terminal at Curzon Street and close to Birmingham’s Knowledge Quarter, the new dynamic broadcasting hub and net-zero workplace will house 700 staff across TV and radio and contain eight radio studios, 10 edit suites, a TV studio, a lecture theatre and four apparatus rooms.
You might recognise The Tea Factory from the 2018 Steven Spielberg movie Ready Player One, in which the factory’s graffiti-covered basement was featured. Ready Player One was shot across Birmingham in 2016, with the city standing in for Columbus, Ohio – who’d have thought?
Other filming locations included Livery Street in the Jewellery Quarter and Ludgate Hill Car Park on Lionel Street, where one of the film’s planned explosion prompted local residents to ring the emergency services.
This is a significant step, not just for the BBC, but for invigorating the wider creative industries in the Midlands. We are transforming The Tea Factory into a world-class state-of-the-art production facility which will benefit the region for generations to come.
Tim Davie
Former BBC Director-General
Cutting the custard
The regeneration of the post-industrial land centred around the iconic Custard Factory will support the creation of over 16,400 jobs, providing a boost to the Birmingham and wider West Midlands economy. Appointed for MEP, Vertical Transportation, Fire Engineering, Sustainability, Air Quality and Acoustics for Digbeth’s Phoenix Yard, we have developed an integrated services solution, with our designs complementing the overall vision for the mixed-use office/residential-led development. It will provide up to 2.2 million sq ft of commercial space and 1,850 homes alongside shops, restaurants, cafes and leisure facilities.
Digbeth photos: Lizee Oliver
Digbeth is evolving from its industrial roots to a modern, thriving creative community
Luke Blyth
Director, Hoare Lea
This Digbeth here I wouldn’t know: firing up a latent growth generator
It has been hailed as the next happening place for decades, and now, with the added weight of major media headquarters, residential and mixed-use development and a burgeoning grassroots culture of studios and makers, something is happening.
Placemakers and developers are mindful of the productive but uneasy tension between authenticity and redevelopment pressure. There is a need to protect the area’s distinctive character while pursuing large-scale regeneration that will allow it to compete nationally and globally, with many residents preferring local places that reflect Birmingham’s past as a working city, rather than a curated destination.
The Powerhouse Stadium (see below) perfectly embodies the debate: praised by some for rooting itself in Birmingham’s industrial identity but criticised by others for turning that identity into visual spectacle.
Alexander Stadium
A region on the rise
“Birmingham’s Commonwealth Games legacy has been underrated in terms of infrastructure and global visibility, and as a tool for regeneration,” says Luke Blyth, whose team worked on the Alexander Stadium and Sandwell Aquatics Centre which hosted the elite 2022 event and have helped create lasting community value.
Used strategically to accelerate investment and renewal and reframe Birmingham’s international image, the Games reinforced sport as part of the city’s identity rather than acting as a standalone spectacle. Shining a sustained spotlight on a city often overshadowed in international narratives by London and Manchester, they challenged perceptions of Birmingham as secondary and framed it as confident and culturally distinct. The visual storytelling presented a picture of a diverse, contemporary destination.
The impact? It was psychological as well as physical: normalising bold ambition and scale, embedding sport within long-term planning and using it to anchor regeneration, tell local stories and publicly stage local pride, belonging, and aspiration to reinforce belief in the city’s future.
Images: Heatherwick Studio
Too often, stadiums feel like spaceships that could have landed anywhere, sterilising the surrounding area. Ours grows from Birmingham itself; from its brickworks, its history of a thousand trades, and the craft at the core of its culture.
It’s also a wholehearted place for the community. The stadium will truly come alive where it meets the ground; a place for play, gathering, and everyday life. Our goal is to capture the spirit of the city and play it back to Birmingham.
Thomas Heatherwick
Powerhouse Stadium designer
Football factory: game-changing stadium reflects brickworks heritage
Love it or hate it, with its 12 chimney like towers likened by some to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, a power station, and a bouncy castle (hello Villa fans; that you?), the design for Birmingham City Football Club’s 62,000-capacity Powerhouse Stadium in Bordesley Green is an intentional conversation starter.
Criticised for being gimmicky and cartoonish, it has also been praised for being bold, distinctive, original and rooted in Birmingham; signalling a shift from the “soulless” glass-bowl design template replicated across the globe. The design is a nod to the brickworks which once sat on the 48-acre site, with one of the towers containing a lift to a bar overlooking the city.
The centrepiece of a multi-billion pound redevelopment in the city, with a retractable roof, moveable pitch and ‘steep bowl’ design facilitating an enhanced matchday experience with markets, cafes, restaurants and play areas, it’s hoped that it will host both sporting and entertainment events from the start of the 2030/2031 season.
The club’s celebrity chairman Tom Wagner, co-founder of Knighthead Capital Management which is leading on the city’s Sports Quarter, intends it to be a visual statement of intent for the West Midlands, reflecting an ambition to compete at the highest level; a testament to a region on the rise.
Wagner is grabbing Birmingham City Council’s Commonwealth Games slogan ‘be bold, be Birmingham’ with both hands, and embracing the cross-pollination of sectors and bringing in strategic figures to help champion them. With Peaky Blinders director Steven Knight a Blues fan, actor Paul Anderson, who played Arthur Shelby in Peaky Blinders, appeared in a film revealing the stadium at Knight’s Loc. Studios, along with former Birmingham player Jude Bellingham.
Belper Mill
Projects like Belper Mills highlight both the opportunity and the reality of repurposing heritage assets – they bring huge placemaking value, but they’re inherently complex, with constraints that challenge viability, performance and delivery. The key is finding the right balance between preserving what matters and enabling buildings to function for modern occupiers.
Thom Bone
Director, Hoare Lea
Grist for the mill
Elsewhere in notable news for East Midlands regeneration, the world’s first ‘fire-proof’ mill – one of the oldest surviving examples of an iron-framed building – which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site – has been approved for redevelopment.
A clear precursor to the skyscrapers of New York, Belper North Mill introduced vertical load-bearing frames independent of walls, internal skeleton construction, and distributed column and beam systems rather than massive masonry and, as such, represented a turning point in structural engineering worldwide. It also contained a waterwheel-powered ‘teagle’ – what is believed to be the first passenger elevator installed inside a factory and used to transport people and goods between floors. This industrial site, forming part of the Derwent Valley Mills along a 15-mile stretch of river between Cromford and Derby, could comprise 130 flats, shop space, a restaurant or cafe, and office space in future years, and accommodate room for a museum.
“Regeneration in the Midlands isn’t being driven by a single intervention, but by a convergence of investment, culture and adaptive reuse,” says mechanical engineer Thom Bone, who leads multidisciplinary teams across commercial sectors including workplace, residential and mixed-use.
Industrial adaptability that suits a post-industrial economy. A young, diverse population that fuels culture and innovation. A pragmatic mindset that supports delivery over hype. A complexity that now aligns with modern urban reality. What once led Birmingham to be underestimated is increasingly becoming its advantage.
As cities are judged less on image and more on capability, resilience, and inclusivity, this especially unique one is finally being recognised for its long-standing qualities. But incidentally, that Brum image? We love what we see.
Long live Birmingham – backing itself while keeping affordability, culture, and connectivity at the core. Long live the Black Country.
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