The Media Archive for Central England is the public screen archive for the East and West Midlands. An independent charity and company based at the University of Lincoln, MACE acquires, catalogues, preserves and makes widely available moving image materials that inform our understanding of the diverse cultures and histories of communities between the Lincolnshire coast and the Welsh border.
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Gas Street Basin
A lido proposed for Birmingham's historic canal junction at Gas Street Basin. An early look at issues surrounding industrial heritage and increasing leisure time.
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Overview
By 1967 commercial canal transport was just about dead so plans were afoot to redevelop one of Birmingham's great canal interchanges at Gas Street Basin as reporter David Lloyd discovers. There were buildings and road projects springing up across the city from Paradise Circus to the Aston Expressway but it was novel and original to do something with the city's industrial past that didn't just involve a scorched earth policy.
The lido project was put on hold with the Gas Street Basin area not being redeveloped until the 1990s when many of the surviving buildings were sympathetically renovated.
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