Hockley Flyover & Circus, looking towards Newtown

Image: © A J Paxton Taken: 23 Mar 2022

This huge flyover and the roundabout underneath were built around 1967; they can be seen, recently completed and viewed from the opposite direction, in a photo from 1968 by Phyllis Nicklin held in the archives of Birmingham University http://epapers.bham.ac.uk/584/ . Designed for through traffic rather than local convenience, they tore the Hockley district apart, placing a forbidding barrier between Brookfields to the west and what became Newtown to the east, between the Jewellery Quarter to the south and its continuation into Soho Hill to the north. The pedestrian subways can be extremely uninviting Image When the flyover and circus are in the news, it is rarely for good reasons. On the other hand, the central well has been used as a venue for free festivals, while the flyover itself has, like many brutalist, modernist structures, a stark grandeur. Some of the housing blocks of Newtown can be seen to the left beyond the flyover. In front of them a domed structure is being erected. It appears to be a Buddhist temple, the Birmingham Buddhist Maha Vihara, which is being built by a Sri Lankan organisation, the International Buddhist Relief Organisation, according to its UK website http://www.ibro.org.uk/ .

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