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Thu March 28 2024

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Birmingham athletes' village learns from London

4 Jun 18 A planning application is set to be lodged this month for an athletes’ village in Birmingham to support the 2022 Commonwealth Games that the city is hosting.

CGI of the planned athletes' village in Perry Bar
CGI of the planned athletes' village in Perry Bar

The 24-acre site situated in the city’s Perry Barr suburb will be transformed into housing for around 6000 competitors and officials, delivering up to 4,000 additional apartments and townhouses, as well as a bus station and a transport interchange. The aim is to get work started on site next year.

According to the project’s city design & conservation manager, Simon Delahunty-Forrest, the games provide the opportunity to ‘create an exemplary residential neighbourhood’. He told a Built Environment Networking event last month that Birmingham had learned from the mistakes of London – he said that London’s Olympic village for the 2012 games was ‘soulless’ and had failed to create a community-led village.

Birmingham’s athletes’ village will have green roofs, which should be treated as an opportunity for amenity space rather than being value engineered out of the project, he said. The village would seek to retain existing mature tress which would govern the distribution of accommodation on the site, as he added: ‘’The Olympic village felt off the shelf, we should be working with the landscape.’’

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