Here’s where it gets juicy. 156 Great Charles Street has a secret rooftop garden. Yes, a garden. On top of this concrete carbuncle, someone planted shrubs and a few sad-looking bushes. It’s not Kew Gardens, but it’s a bizarre oasis in the middle of a roundabout hell. The view from up there is stunning—you can see the shiny new Birmingham Library, which looks like a disco onion, and the old Rotunda, which looks like a toilet roll that forgot its purpose.
Another fact: the building has more “A” grades than a grammar school headmaster. It’s rated Energy Performance A+—which is a fancy way of saying it’s so well insulated that it could keep a polar bear toasty in an apocalypse. It’s also achieved a BREEAM rating of “Excellent,” which is like winning an Oscar for being least ugly in a category of monsters.
The Ghosts of Office Parties Past
If you listen closely after dark, you can hear the ghosts of forgotten printer jams and the rustle of unpaid invoices. Legend has it that on the third floor, a phantom water cooler still gurgles, even though it was removed in 2014. The local folk say that if you stand in the lift and say “RBS” three times, a man named Dave will appear and offer you a stale biscuit from 1993.
156 Great Charles Street, Crossway, Queensway, Birmingham B3, Serviced
And yet, this building is still standing. It’s a survivor. It saw the rise of the telephone exchange (literally next door), the fall of heavy industry, and the arrival of the city’s tram system, which now rattles past its foundations like a tinnitus patient on a night shift.
