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Cherry Street, BIRMINGHAM, B2 5AR

Shopping streets north of New Street, Birmingham.

The present Metro trams run from St Georges, Wolverhampton to Snow Hill, Birmingham. This extension will see stops at Snow Hill, Corporation Street and Stephenson Street, the last giving access to New Street Station. New higher capacity trams are planned and the depot at Wednesbury will be expanded. This photo shows the work underway in Corporation Street, looking towards New Street. Time photo taken 4.30 pm BST (British Summer Time).

Grade II listed. Listing number 1075705. Built 1881-82 in an Arts and Crafts style by Joseph Lancaster Ball and his first independent work

The present Metro trams run from St Georges, Wolverhampton to Snow Hill, Birmingham. This extension will see stops at Snow Hill, Corporation Street and Stephenson Street, the last giving access to New Street Station. New higher capacity trams are planned and the depot at Wednesbury will be expanded. This photo shows the work underway in Corporation Street, looking towards New Street. Time photo taken 4.27 pm BST (British Summer Time).

3211, one of Travel West Midlands' Scania N113/Alexander RHs of 1991, waits in vain for passengers on Corporation Street on what I recall was a Sunday morning. These buses were purchased for service 50 to Druids Heath, which they monopolised until 1999. However, there were more of them than were required for the 50, so they often appeared on other routes operated from Birmingham Central garage, particularly at weekends (I have happy memories of several Saturday trips to Coventry on them on the 900); this one is operating the 62 to Rednal via Bristol Road (coincidentally the first route on which I sampled one). Non standard, and by then in need of refurbishment, the Scanias were withdrawn in 2003, several years ahead of the last of the older (but more numerous) MCW Metrobuses.

The old and the new in buildings on opposite sides of Cannon Street

By T.P. Bennett & Son, 1957-61. It has a saw-tooth front. Built originally, I think, for Rackham's but now occupied by another department store, House of Fraser.

Birmingham city centre seems to have been in a state of constant redevelopment for the past five or six decades and the new Metro extension linking Snow Hill and New Street Stations is adding to it. This is the view north along Corporation St from its junction with Union St, with the tower of the Methodist Central Hall in the middle distance.