ABSTRACT
In the early 1990s Birmingham, the second-largest city in the United Kingdom, reinvented itself. Formerly the metal-bashing heart of manufacturing Britain, and renowned for both its civic culture and brutal postwar redevelopment around a shopping market and traffic roundabouts, the city was traumatised by each of the postwar depressions. Like many another post-industrial metropolis across the globe, it attempted to foster the creation of a new site of mass consumption for the present and future, rationalised by a narrative of renaissance that was based on the tapestry of historical tales of the past. Mass consumption focused on new shopping malls, a theatre district, an international conference centre and associated hotels and new sports developments to host international events.1 The storyline that stitched this tapestry together was in some ways more interesting.
