Yardley, in East Birmingham was where I grew up and a big part of my early childhood was walking down to the shopping centre at the Swan which straddles the Coventry Road. It’s one of those places that as a kid is huge but as an adult seems a strange parochial place. In recent years it’s become incredibly run down and it’s brutalist 60’s concrete architecture has crumbled and decayed to the point that there are only a handful of shops remaining.

Inevitably it’s scheduled for demolition this year to be replaced by a huge Tescos. Jenny Drew, town centre manager for Yardley put out a call to the Birmingham Flickr group and The Yardley Photographic Society to document the site before the redevelopment begins later in the year and so we all descended there yesterday.

The place had a lot of atmosphere, so much so I’m going to try and spin it out into a larger project, hopefully going back there to shoot some large format film. The place deserves a good send off.

my initial pictures are here , images from other Flickrers are going up on this tag