St Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham

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.

The Old Joint Stock Theatre is a studio theatre and pub located at 4 Temple Row West in the centre of Birmingham, England. The listed building was designed as a library but owes its present name to its use by Birmingham Joint Stock Bank.

Colmore Row is a street in Birmingham City Centre in the centre of Birmingham, England, running from Victoria Square to just beyond Snow Hill station. It is traditionally the city's most prestigious business address.Colmore Row and its environs were designated a conservation area in 1971, which was extended twice in 1985. Colmore Row itself has 23 listed buildings, two listed at Grade I and two at Grade II*.

The Birmingham Banking Company was a bank that operated in Birmingham, West Midlands from 1829 to 1889, and as The Metropolitan and Birmingham Bank from 1889 to 1892, the Metropolitan, Birmingham and South Wales Bank from 1892 to 1893, and the Metropolitan Bank (of England and Wales) from 1893 to 1914, when it was acquired by the Midland Bank.

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.

The Trocadero, 17 Temple Street, Birmingham, England, currently a pub, is a dazzling demonstration of the use of coloured glazed tile and terracotta in the post-Victorian era of architecture. Formerly the Fire Engine House for the Norwich Union Insurance Company (1846, Edge & Avery), it was altered in 1883 to make the Bodega wine bar. It was given the current colourful glazed front in 1902 when it became the Trocadero. It is Grade II listed. The pub is noted as a meeting place for the Birmingham Surrealists group of artists and intellectuals associated with the city from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Bennetts Hill is a street in the Core area of Birmingham City Centre, United Kingdom. It runs from New Street, uphill to Colmore Row, crossing Waterloo Street in the process. It is within the Colmore Row conservation area.

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 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.

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.

Corporation Street is a tram stop on Line 1 of the West Midlands Metro serving Corporation Street, a major thoroughfare in Birmingham City Centre, England. Government approval for the extension from Snow Hill to Grand Central was given on 16 February 2012. It was opened on 30 May 2016.The stop only has a shelter on the northbound side. The southbound side has no shelter presumably because at the time it was the penultimate stop before the terminus at Grand Central.

Corporation Street is a main shopping street in Birmingham city centre, England. It runs from the law courts at its northern end to the centre of New Street at its southern.