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.

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.