Mailbox Birmingham (also known as The Mailbox) is a mixed-use development located within the
city centre of
Birmingham
Birmingham ( ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands (county), West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1. ...
,
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
. It houses British luxury department store chain
Harvey Nichols
Harvey Nichols is a British luxury department store chain founded in 1831, at its flagship store in Knightsbridge, London. It sells designer fashion collections for men and women, fashion accessories, beauty products, fine wines and luxury f ...
, and the
BBC Birmingham
BBC Birmingham is one of the oldest regional arms of the BBC, located in Birmingham. It was the first region outside London to start broadcasting both the corporation's radio (in 1922) and television (in 1949) transmissions, the latter from th ...
studios.
The scheme comprises 689,000 sq. ft. of primarily office space, with ancillary retail and leisure offering, located on a 4.8-acre waterside site. It is home to occupiers including
BBC Birmingham
BBC Birmingham is one of the oldest regional arms of the BBC, located in Birmingham. It was the first region outside London to start broadcasting both the corporation's radio (in 1922) and television (in 1949) transmissions, the latter from th ...
,
WSP,
Associated Architects
Associated Architects' Birmingham Offices are located in The Mailbox, which was designed by the practice
RIBA Award Winner 2009, David Wilson Library
Associated Architects is a leadinAJ100 architectural firm with offices in Birmingham and Le ...
,
Harvey Nichols
Harvey Nichols is a British luxury department store chain founded in 1831, at its flagship store in Knightsbridge, London. It sells designer fashion collections for men and women, fashion accessories, beauty products, fine wines and luxury f ...
,
Malmaison Birmingham and other leading stores and restaurants.
The Mailbox is about long from front to back including
The Cube. Above the front shops it has an additional 6 floors which includes a hotel and residential apartments. The
Worcester and Birmingham Canal passes along the back with a number of restaurants overlooking.
History
Previously the location of a
railway goods yard with canal wharves off the
Worcester and Birmingham Canal leading to Gas Street Basin, the site was the location of the
Royal Mail's main
sorting office
A sorting office or processing and distribution center (P&DC; name used by the United States Postal Service (USPS)) is any location where postal operators bring mail after collection for sorting into batches for delivery to the addressee, which ...
building for Birmingham (hence its current name) which was completed in 1970, replacing the Victorian head post office (now
Victoria Square House
Victoria Square House, is an office building on the south side of Victoria Square, Birmingham, England. It was formerly Birmingham's Head Post Office, designed in the French Renaissance style by architect for the Office of Works Henry Tanne ...
), in
Victoria Square. The new building was designed by R. H. Ousman of the
Ministry of Public Building and Works
Ministry may refer to:
Government
* Ministry (collective executive), the complete body of government ministers under the leadership of a prime minister
* Ministry (government department), a department of a government
Religion
* Christian mi ...
, who collaborated with project architect H. A. E. Giddings and with Hubbard Ford & Partners, who supplied E. Winters and R. Lee as architects. When completed, it was the largest mechanised letters and parcels sorting office in the country with a floor area of and the largest building in Birmingham. A tunnel was constructed between the site and
New Street railway station allowing electric tractors hauling carts carrying sacks of mail to be driven directly to the office. The structure housed the largest electronic sorting equipment in the
West Midlands to handle the post.
It also housed the administrative teams moved from Victoria Square, including those for other
Post Office
A post office is a public facility and a retailer that provides mail services, such as accepting letters and parcels, providing post office boxes, and selling postage stamps, packaging, and stationery. Post offices may offer additional ser ...
functions, such as counter services.
The main entrance was located at Blucher Street beneath a tower set between a square block for parcels on the left and a lower block for the letters sorting office on the right. The structure consisted of a steel frame on a square grid with lightweight pre-cast concrete floor slabs and reinforced concrete retaining walls and sub floors. The exterior was clad with cast glass troughs and exposed aggregate panels. Ventilation was provided through air-handling units which provided the building with the temperature it required. Extract fans were also placed on the roof. The exterior consisted mainly of the glass slabs and projecting air handling units with recessed windows.
Redevelopment
1997
The Royal Mail sorting office was recognised by Chatham in 1997. Chatham had been an important figure in the regeneration of Birmingham, working with
Argent
In heraldry, argent () is the tincture of silver, and belongs to the class of light tinctures called "metals". It is very frequently depicted as white and usually considered interchangeable with it. In engravings and line drawings, regions to ...
to develop
Brindleyplace
Brindleyplace is a large mixed-use canalside development, in the Westside district of Birmingham, England. It was named after Brindley Place, the name of the street (in turn named after the 18th century canal engineer James Brindley) around whi ...
. He found out that the sorting office was to be sold and tried to convince Argent about the potential the building offered if it were to be converted into a mixed-use building. Argent was unconvinced and so Chatham decided to establish his own development company, ''Birmingham Development Company'', and purchased the building in 1998 for £3 million. He also paid a further £1 million for the surrounding waterfront buildings.
Soon after purchasing the building, he sold the air-rights to
Crosby Homes
Crosby Homes was a major British residential house-building business. It was acquired by Lendlease in 2005.
History
Crosby Homes was established in the mid-1920s by James Crosby to build houses in north Cheshire. During the War it turned to civil ...
, providing him with further money for redeveloping the building.
The building was converted by the Birmingham Development Company and designed by the
RIBA award winning, Birmingham practice,
Associated Architects
Associated Architects' Birmingham Offices are located in The Mailbox, which was designed by the practice
RIBA Award Winner 2009, David Wilson Library
Associated Architects is a leadinAJ100 architectural firm with offices in Birmingham and Le ...
. It was to include two hotels with a total of 300 rooms, 15,850 sq. m (170,000 sg. ft.) of office space, 9,290 sq. m (100,000 sq ft.) of retail space and a similar area for restaurants and a health club.
Crosby Homes constructed apartments above the space. The redevelopment of the sorting office involved demolition of all but the
steel sub-structure. It cost £150 million overall and opened in December 2000. Following the purchase of two retail units by
Harvey Nichols
Harvey Nichols is a British luxury department store chain founded in 1831, at its flagship store in Knightsbridge, London. It sells designer fashion collections for men and women, fashion accessories, beauty products, fine wines and luxury f ...
, the development was valued at over £125 million.
A public square the size of
Chamberlain Square
Chamberlain Square or Chamberlain Place is a public square in central Birmingham, England, named after statesman and notable mayor of Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain. The Victorian square was drastically remodelled in the 1970s, with most of th ...
was created to the front of the Mailbox beneath Suffolk Street Queensway. It was paved with natural stone and as well as being a social area, it was also designed to allow the easy movement of visitors to, from and around the building. The area to the rear of the building is used frequently by the public. At the back of the Mailbox a walkway leads over a bridge and to the canal towpaths near
Gas Street Basin
Gas Street Basin () is a canal basin in the centre of Birmingham, England, where the Worcester and Birmingham Canal meets the BCN Main Line. It is located on Gas Street, off Broad Street, and between the Mailbox and Brindleyplace canal-side d ...
. A mixed-use building called the
Cube, designed by Birmingham born architect
Ken Shuttleworth's practice
Make Architects
Make Architects is an international architecture practice headquartered in London that also has offices in offices in Hong Kong and Sydney. Founded in 2004 by former Foster + Partners architect Ken Shuttleworth. The practice has a variety of proj ...
with
Buro Happold engineers forms the final phase of the Mailbox development and houses a rooftop restaurant, boutique hotel and residential flats.
In 2004,
BBC Birmingham
BBC Birmingham is one of the oldest regional arms of the BBC, located in Birmingham. It was the first region outside London to start broadcasting both the corporation's radio (in 1922) and television (in 1949) transmissions, the latter from th ...
moved into a new complex of studios at the Mailbox that replaced the previous
Pebble Mill
Pebble Mill Studios was the BBC's television studio complex located in Edgbaston, Birmingham, England, United Kingdom, which served as the headquarters for BBC Birmingham from 1971 until 2004. The nine-acre site was opened by Princess Anne o ...
site in
Edgbaston
Edgbaston () is an affluent suburban area of central Birmingham, England, historically in Warwickshire, and curved around the southwest of the city centre.
In the 19th century, the area was under the control of the Gough-Calthorpe family a ...
. The general public is able to watch
radio
Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transmi ...
and
television
Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertisin ...
broadcasts being made at an all-access public foyer, as well as surf the
BBC website
BBC Online, formerly known as BBCi, is the BBC's online service. It is a large network of websites including such high-profile sites as BBC News and BBC Sport, Sport, the on-demand video and radio services branded BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds, t ...
and purchase
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
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...
merchandise. On 31 October 2005, 81-year-old actress
''. On 16 February 2008, a shooting incident took place at Cafe Lazeez at the Mailbox.
In April 2011 the Mailbox was sold for £127.1 million to a joint venture between Brockton Capital and Milligan.
On 30 May 2013, Milligan Retail announced that the Mailbox would undergo a major renovation, designed by
, which would see a roof installed over the shopping complex's atrium. The anchor store,
, would double in size to over 45,000 sq. ft. It was also announced that Brockton Capital and Milligan would work in co-ordination with Birmingham City Council to improve the public area reaching from the underpass beneath Suffolk Street Queensway to the front of Mailbox. These changes would be implemented to complement the redevelopment of
would take space at the Mailbox, opening a 12,000 sq. ft 3-screen cinema in the latter part of 2014, ahead of the completion of the whole scheme in 2015.
will also open in the redeveloped centre in 2015 whilst an improved way-finding system will be introduced to improve shoppers' experience.
On 13 March 2015, Gas Street Social opened at the Mailbox.
In August 2022 it was announced that the BBC intends to leave The Mailbox when its current lease comes to an end in 2026.
In December 2019, Brockton Capital and Milligan sold the Mailbox to M7 Real Estate ("M7").
In October 2020, M7 announced its intention to float Mailbox on the International Property Securities Exchange ("IPSX"), making it the first single property REIT to be listed on a dedicated property stock exchange. Shares in Mailbox REIT commenced trading on 14 May 2021.
In April 2022, M7 completed the conversion of level one of the Mailbox from retail into 50,000 sq. ft. of flexible office space, which is now operated by
under its ''Spaces'' co-working brand under a new 10 year management agreement. The accommodation has been well received with occupancy in excess of 60% by October 2022.