Venues Birmingham Has Lost: The Clubs and Halls That Closed, and When

People still search for Birmingham venues that no longer trade, and for several that never stopped trading but changed their name.

Both cases send visitors to the wrong place, so this page separates them. Where a venue has genuinely gone, it says what happened and when, with the source for each closure.

The distinction matters more here than in most cities, because Birmingham has renamed a great deal of its large infrastructure through sponsorship.

An arena that has carried four names in three decades looks, to anyone searching an older name, exactly like a venue that has disappeared, when in fact it never shut its doors for a single season.

Gatecrasher is the clearest case. The club at 182 Upper Broad Street lost its licence and closed for good on 25 November 2015, after a stabbing on Halloween night and a brawl reported to have involved security staff. It had been among the largest single nightclubs in the city centre.

Jongleurs is the harder one to pin down, and it is worth being honest about that. The Birmingham branch of the comedy chain has closed and reopened more than once, and its Broad Street listings have not stayed consistent. The safe approach is to check it is trading before making an evening of it.

The building on King Edwards Road opened in 1991 as the National Indoor Arena, then the largest indoor arena in Britain. It became the Barclaycard Arena in 2014, Arena Birmingham in 2017 and the Utilita Arena in 2020, which amounts to four separate names for one entirely unchanged venue over the course of three decades.

The same has happened east of the city. The arena on the National Exhibition Centre site has been the NEC Arena, the Genting Arena, the Resorts World Arena and, since September 2024, bp pulse LIVE. Birmingham City's ground took the name St Andrew's @ Knighthead Park in 2024, and it remains the same stadium on the same Bordesley site.

Broad Street ran west from the centre towards Five Ways and held the densest concentration of large nightclubs in the city through the 1990s and 2000s.

Bars and restaurants still line it, and the ICC and Symphony Hall anchor its eastern end, but the very large single-room clubs have largely gone.

Digbeth absorbed a good deal of what left. The Custard Factory and the warehouses around it now carry much of the music and club programming, alongside studios and street food, and the area's character has shifted accordingly across the past decade, as the studios and the film work arrived alongside them.

Not every disappearance is a closure. Aston Hall survives as a museum, and the Rowton House on Alcester Street went from a working men's lodging house of 1903 to a hotel and is Grade II listed. Birmingham has a long record of finding a second use for a building rather than losing it.