Colmore Gate

The Great Western Arcade (grid reference SP070871) is a covered Grade II listed Victorian shopping arcade lying between Colmore Row and Temple Row in Birmingham City Centre, England. It was built (1875-6) over the Great Western Railway line cutting at the London end of Snow Hill station. The cutting was covered in 1874. Originally the broad gauge Paddington line ran through a tunnel which stopped at Temple Row and then an open cutting to Snow Hill station. The cutting was roofed over in 1874 and the Great Western Arcade built on top, the line of the new 'tunnel' being offset slightly to the north of the centre of the arcade. The extended tunnel has a length of 596 yards (545 m). The arcade was designed by W. H. Ward of Paradise Street, Birmingham. The arcade has entrances at each end: the one at Temple Row is ornate, unlike the modern reworking at Colmore Row, opposite the entrance to the station. The arcade's roof was originally a glazed semi-circular barrel vault with a glazed central dome, similar to that of the Gallerio Vittoria Emmanuele in Milan which was constructed at the same time. It was destroyed during World War II and has been replaced. The arcade, containing shops on both sides, has a clock which strikes the quarters on a set of five exposed bells.

Bull Street tram stop is a tram stop on the West Midlands Metro tram system serving Bull Street in the Birmingham city centre, England. Construction started in June 2012, and it was opened on 6 December 2015, becoming the first stop of the city-centre extension to open, and the first on-street tram stop to operate in Birmingham since the closure of the Birmingham Corporation Tramways in 1953, and the temporary southern terminus of the service. The rest of the extension to Grand Central was opened on 30 May 2016, and then onto Edgbaston Village in July 2022. Work started on a new line to Birmingham Moor Street in 2022 which will be gradually extended to the eventual terminus at Birmingham Airport. To allow for the new connection to be made it became necessary to temporarily terminate all trams at Bull Street.

St. Philip's Parish Library, also known as the Higgs Library, was a public library attached to St Philip's Church in Birmingham, England between 1733 and 1927.The library was founded in 1733 by St. Philip's first rector William Higgs and was based around his own collection of books, supplemented by purchases paid for from a bequest of £200. Unlike Birmingham's earliest public library, founded between 1635 and 1642, or the later Birmingham Library of 1779 – both of which were largely dissenting institutions – Higgs' Library was associated with the established Church of England. Advertised as "free to all clergymen in the town and neighbourhood", it was also open to laymen with the permission of the rectors of St. Philips or of Birmingham's original parish of St Martin in the Bull Ring.The library moved in 1792 to a room adjoining the parsonage in St. Philip's churchyard. A catalogue of 1795 shows that by then the library had acquired a wide range of books on philosophy, history, economics, education and literary criticism, as well as the expected range of theological and ecclesiastical literature.The library was closed in 1927, with 300 volumes from its collection being presented to Birmingham Central Library and 150 volumes being presented to Queen's College, Edgbaston.

West Midlands Police is the territorial police force responsible for policing the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. The force covers an area of 348 square miles (900 km2) with 2.93 million inhabitants, which includes the cities of Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton and also the Black Country. In 2020, there were 6,846 officers, 484 police community support officers (PCSO), and 219 volunteer special constables.The force is led by Chief Constable Craig Guildford. The force area is divided into ten Local Policing Units (LPUs), each being served by four core policing teams – Response, Neighbourhood, Investigation and Community Action & Priority (CAPT) – with the support of a number of specialist crime teams. These specialist teams include CID, traffic and a firearms unit. West Midlands Police is a partner, alongside Staffordshire Police, in the Central Motorway Police Group. The force is party to a number of other resource sharing agreements including the National Police Air Service.

The Royal Hotel, originally just The Hotel, was a hotel located on Temple Row in Birmingham, England. Opened in 1772, it was the first establishment in Birmingham to describe itself as a "hotel", a new term entering usage around this time to denote a more fashionable and genteel establishment than the more traditional inn.Notable guests who stayed at the hotel included Louis XVIII of France, Lord Nelson, the Duke of Gloucester and Queen Victoria. As well as accommodation for visitors, the hotel included assembly rooms that formed Birmingham's main meeting place for polite social gatherings during the later part of the Midlands Enlightenment. 80 feet long and 30 feet wide, the assembly rooms included an organ and space for an orchestra, and were decorated in a "tasteful and decorative manner" with three large chandeliers, six large mirrors and five cut glass lustres designed to reflect candlelight throughout the room. The room was accessed through a "spacious saloon" and up a grand staircase. The building of the hotel was motivated by criticism of Sawyer's Assembly Rooms in Old Square in 1765 by the Duke of York, who remarked that "a town of such magnitude as Birmingham, and adorned with so much beauty, deserved a superior accommodation, that the room itself was mean, but the entrance still meaner". In response to this slight a group of influential local figures met at Widow Aston's Coffee House in Cherry Street in 1770 and resolved to raise £4,000 to build a hotel worthy of the town's reputation. The result was the establishment of a tontine, that eventually raised £15,000 with subscribers including John Ash, founder of Birmingham General Hospital; Matthew Boulton, the owner of the Soho Manufactory; Charles Holte of Aston Hall; John Taylor, one of the founders of Lloyds Bank; and Lunar Society member Thomas Day.The principal events of the social season at the hotel during its early years were its Subscription Dancing Assemblies, and series of concerts held by Jeremiah Clark and the Birmingham Dilettanti Musical Society. In 1788 these were combined to form a single social season which featured six concerts and balls held every month during the winter, with card and dancing assemblies during the intervening fortnights, and a separate season of monthly concerts during the summer. From 1790 the hotel was one of the venues for the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival.On 14 July 1791 the hotel was the venue for the dinner to celebrate the storming of the Bastille that was to lead to the Priestley Riots, and on 14 December 1829 it was the site of the founding of Thomas Attwood's Birmingham Political Union.The hotel retained an upmarket reputation throughout its existence, but with only three shares remaining and the lease on the hotel expiring, the tontine was wound up in 1861 and the hotel sold for redevelopment.

Lloyd House is the headquarters and since 2017 Central station of the West Midlands Police, the territorial police force responsible for policing the West Midlands metropolitan county in the United Kingdom. The building also houses the office of the West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner.The building sits on Snow Hill Queensway, at the junction with Colmore Circus Queensway and Weaman Street, in Birmingham city centre.

The Birmingham Post and Mail building was constructed in the 1960s and was a symbol of the rebuilding of Birmingham, England, following the devastation of World War II.

The Colmore Building, formerly known as Colmore Plaza, is a 14-storey office building in the Colmore Business District area of Birmingham City Centre.

Snowhill is a mixed-use development in the Colmore business district, known historically as Snow Hill, in Central Birmingham, England. The area, between Snow Hill Queensway and Birmingham Snow Hill station, is being redeveloped by the Ballymore Group. The £500 million phased scheme has been partly completed on the site of a former surface car park adjacent to the railway station and West Midlands Metro terminus. As part of the project, St Chad's Circus on the Inner Ring Road was levelled and reconfigured to create a new square adjacent to St Chad's Cathedral and a viaduct was constructed alongside the station for the extension of the West Midlands Metro into the city centre. A 13-storey office building called One Snowhill was completed in 2009. Tenants are KPMG, Barclays and DWF. The 14-storey Two Snowhill was completed with ground floor retail space in May 2013. The 17-storey Three Snowhill was completed in 2020.

The Grand Hotel is a Grade II* listed Victorian five star hotel in the city centre of Birmingham, England. The hotel occupies the greater part of a block bounded by Colmore Row, Church Street, Barwick Street and Livery Street and overlooks St Philip's Cathedral and churchyard. Designed by architect Thomson Plevins, construction began in 1875 and the hotel opened in 1879. Extensions and extensive interior renovations were undertaken by prominent Birmingham architecture firm Martin & Chamberlain from 1890 to 1895. Interior renovations included the building of the Grosvenor Room with Louis XIV style decoration. The hotel closed in 2002 and due to the risk of crumbling stonework where it remained under scaffolding and protective covers for ten years. In 2012 planning permission was granted for plans to restore the building into a luxury hotel. Works to the exterior began in October 2012 and completed in 2021. The hotel reopened in May 2021 with 185 bedrooms, two new bars and a restaurant, a gymnasium, meeting rooms, collaboration areas, and event spaces.

Birmingham Snow Hill, also known as Snow Hill station, is a railway station in Birmingham City Centre. It is one of the three main city-centre stations in Birmingham, along with Birmingham New Street and Birmingham Moor Street. Snow Hill was once the main station of the Great Western Railway in Birmingham and, at its height, it rivalled New Street station with competitive services to destinations including London Paddington, Wolverhampton Low Level, Birkenhead Woodside, Wales and South West England. The station has been rebuilt several times since the first station at Snow Hill, a temporary wooden structure, was opened in 1852; it was rebuilt as a permanent station in 1871 and then rebuilt again on a much grander scale during 1906–1912. The electrification of the main line from London to New Street in the 1960s saw New Street favoured over Snow Hill, most of whose services were withdrawn in the late 1960s. This led to the station's eventual closure in 1972 and its demolition five years later. After fifteen years of closure, a new Snow Hill station, the present incarnation, was built; it reopened in 1987. Today, most of the trains using Snow Hill are local services on the Snow Hill Lines, operated by West Midlands Railway, serving Worcester Shrub Hill, Kidderminster, Stourbridge Junction, Stratford-upon-Avon and Solihull. The only long-distance service using Snow Hill is to and from London Marylebone, operated by Chiltern Railways via the Chiltern Main Line. The present Snow Hill station has three platforms for National Rail trains. When it was originally reopened in 1987, it had four, but one was later converted in 1999 for use as a terminus for West Midlands Metro trams on the line from Wolverhampton. This tram terminus closed in October 2015, in order for the extension of the West Midlands Metro through Birmingham city centre to be connected; this included a dedicated embankment for trams alongside the station and included a new through stop serving Snow Hill.

The Gun Quarter is a district of the city of Birmingham, England, which was for many years a centre of the world's gun-manufacturing industry, specialising in the production of military firearms and sporting guns. It is an industrial area to the north of the city centre, bounded by Steelhouse Lane, Shadwell Street and Loveday Street. The first recorded gun maker in Birmingham was in 1630, and locally made muskets were used in the English Civil War. By the 1690s Birmingham artisans were supplying guns for William III to equip the English Army (and successor British Army after 1707). The importance of the trade to the town grew rapidly throughout the 18th century, with large numbers of guns produced for the slave trade. The 19th century saw further expansion, with the Quarter meeting the demand for the Napoleonic Wars, Crimean War, American Civil War and the British Empire. During both the First and Second World Wars the area played a major role in the manufacture of small arms for the British Armed Forces. After the First World War demand fell; the need for skilled, specialised labour fell as the market became flooded with cheaper, machine-made guns, and gun manufacturing in the area began a slow decline. In the 1960s, a large part of the Gun Quarter was demolished by post-war town planners, with the area split in two by the construction of the Birmingham Inner Ring Road. Following the Big City Plan of 2008, the Gun Quarter is now a district within Birmingham City Centre. Many buildings in the area are disused but plans are in place for redevelopment including in Shadwell Street and Vesey Street.