Birmingham and the West Midlands has some stunning examples of architecture, but like most areas the city isn't shy of a few eyesores. I'm here today in the city centre to speak to people here and find out which landmarks in the region they consider to be the grottiest.
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00:00 I think when you walk up New Street I think a lot of the concrete buildings
00:04 especially the old Britannia Hotel is quite a bit of an eyesore.
00:07 It's not aged particularly well Birmingham is the concrete sort of city.
00:11 I mean there's a lot of redevelopment works that are going on especially up by
00:15 Victoria Square, round by the mailbox, the cube etc. So it's good to see the
00:18 parts are coming along but I think definitely main parts of New Street
00:22 need to be redeveloped and being brought more inside the modern world just to
00:27 purely you know give some more life back to the area which is what it needs.
00:31 I think the Parasites is dated and doesn't look good and it can be quite
00:41 intimidating when you're walking up to it.
00:44 Generally speaking what are your thoughts on Birmingham's architecture
00:47 and landmarks? Do you think it's quite a nice-looking city?
00:51 Yeah it's getting a lot better from from where it was maybe 10 years ago it's
00:56 certainly improving. Some of the old buildings are really really cool yeah
01:00 yeah yeah it's generally it's good.
01:04 I think aesthetics and eyesores in Birmingham so like I think there are
01:10 certainly parts of the city that are really appealing like some of the old
01:13 terracotta buildings areas of the city centre. If I'm thinking eyesores it's
01:18 got to be stuff like they're like all of like HMO and student housing and like
01:24 Sellio. You take a wander around there because I went to university at
01:27 University in Birmingham so you take a walk around there and it's very dingy I
01:34 guess. It's really unfortunate I guess what's happened to that area.
01:39 All the closed shop fronts really more than anything Mike. You walk down the
01:44 street and there's just so many closed shops it's just it's a bit just gross to
01:49 look at really but yeah that's that's all I can think of really.
01:52 I think I can't think of a particular particular landmark as per se but I do
02:00 think that one of the things that we could improve on in Birmingham itself is
02:05 is cleanliness. I think over the years we've seen more and more litter. I think
02:10 when I was growing up you would see this keep Britain tidy campaign and I think
02:15 everybody took a bit of pride in it and it started from a very young generation.
02:19 I don't see that happening that much as as much as I did see when I was a child.
02:24 I'd like to see some sort of initiative introduced reintroduced again and I
02:29 think general cleanliness helps build civic pride into an area and once you've
02:35 got civic pride people feel a bit better about themselves and they have more
02:39 respectful for the area and I think it just generally uplifts the mood of the
02:43 people. So I think cleanliness is is just generally an ongoing theme so I haven't
02:48 got a particular eyesore monument but I think in all I think Birmingham
02:55 itself could could do with an uplift in its clean cleanliness.
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