Mending Wall - in 'Proceedings of the 18th International Docomomo Conference': Continuity in the Modernist City: Interpreting Smallbrook Ringway Centre, Birmingham

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.

The title of this paper and the excerpt are from Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall, written at the onset of the First World War. Here, the seasonal and mutual upkeep of a rural dry-stone wall becomes a metaphor for the contested nature of national and domestic borders, as well as what constitutes our sense of identity at a moment of profound global change. Similarly, Sennett’s notion of the open “edge-as-border” proposes an urban dimension to Frost’s rural prose, locating the building and street as a place of civic participation. Together, these frame important questions about the nature of the building as a wall, and the maintenance and renewal of such structures.

Conceived as gated city wall, Smallbrook Ringway Centre (James Roberts, 1962) was one of the first buildings to line Birmingham’s Inner Ring Road, addressing the changing patterns of life and mobility, and representative of the power of city governance. That representation is now at risk, the locally listed building condemned by its developers as a wall and recently approved for demolition after a nationally fought campaign for its renewal.

Through a critical analysis of Smallbrook Ringway Centre and interpretation in the form of a counterproposal, this paper explores the dynamic relationships “between the old and the new, the temporal and the timeless, innovation and quotation”.

The analytical and interpretive dimensions of the paper contribute to a unique understanding of this modernist building which remains at risk, offering a framework for thinking about heritage concerned neither with preservation nor progress, instead calling for what St. John Wilson describes as ‘a paradoxical interpretation of tradition as the springboard for innovation’.