This article is taken from the April 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
About a year ago, I woke up to the sound of fire alarms and the faint smell of smoke. I bolted upright in my Digbeth flat in Birmingham — a huge old redbrick converted warehouse from the 1920s. I remember cracking open my window and peering out.
The building attached to mine was on fire. The structure is a beautiful three-storey tiled warehouse dating from the Edwardian era. The architectural critic Nikolaus Pevsner described the place, designed by F.H. Thomason (presumably a relation to Yeoville Thomason who built Birmingham’s monumental council house) as having “beautiful giant arches”. According to the great critic, the warehouse housed a shoe factory some time in the 1950s.
I later learned from the fire services that, as of 2025, the building had been used as a giant makeshift bin, an anarchic refuse site, during the ongoing strikes in the city. The rubbish had piled up and something, somewhere, had set it all on fire.
The site, called the Stone Galleon, was due to be developed into flats in 2014, but regardless of the housing crisis and rising potential rental yields, no development has happened. Indeed, the structure has been abandoned for as long as anyone can remember.
Once the fire died down and the emergency crews disappeared, I left my flat and tried to get inside the Stone Galleon building. After a few minutes of pushing at doors and windows, I found dozens of clearly ignored repair notices pinned to a wall by Birmingham City Council. All of them were addressed to a company called Bitton Invest Corp.
A few minutes of digging revealed that Bitton Invest Corp is registered in the city of Road Town, British Virgin Islands. Realistically, my search for the real owners of the old shoe factory stopped here — the directorships and ownership of companies registered in the Virgin Islands are notoriously opaque.
I felt a bit like a 19th century Irish peasant raging at his Anglo-Irish absentee landlord who had let the local church fall into ruin. There is little accountability to be found in a shell company registered thousands of miles away: what are local councillors, or even MPs, supposed to do with a three-letter name company with no contact details?
This isn’t the first time I’ve been woken up by a fire in a monumental civic building in Birmingham. A few months before the blaze in the Stone Galleon, another vast 1900s warehouse — the S&K — erupted in flames, covering the sky in thick black smoke.
An FOI request from a local activist group recently revealed that there have been 28 fire service call-outs to four derelict sites in the area since 2021.
This time, the structure is controlled not by an unaccountable foreign shell, but by a tiny property company called Future High Street Living (Digbeth) Ltd, which had gone bankrupt a few days earlier. Owned by a local West Midlands property developer called Sam Ginda, the huge redbrick civic building was clearly too much for him, and plans to turn the structure into flats never materialised.
And it’s not just Birmingham. Beautiful old Victorian buildings such as St Simon’s Church in Partick, Glasgow, and the Hotspur Press in south-central Manchester have also burnt down almost inexplicably, with little more than a shrug from local authorities.
Sources in Birmingham, Glasgow and Liverpool tell me the litany of grand Victorian and Edwardian civic buildings being left to rot in provincial cities can be explained by two trends. The first is that lower prices for landmark buildings in cities such as Birmingham, Liverpool and Glasgow attract small operators who can’t compete for development opportunities in the South East and London. But when a sole trader does get their hands on a piece of history, they often can’t afford to develop it.
The second dynamic involves offshore companies speculatively purchasing grand but underpriced civic buildings in provincial cities,then seeking a return on their investment through increasing land values, rather than productive development or rental yields. In short, many companies find it more effective to let a building rot for decades with little or no security and no tenants, rather than investing in repairs that might allow them to lease the property.
Not only that, but absentee ownership also bleeds into a whole host of other negative consequences. For instance, unpredictable fires and rotting, uncared-for buildings put people living and working in an area in real danger, and often deter further investment.
This is a noticeable dynamic in Birmingham, where the ever-delayed promise of HS2 and 49-minute commutes into London have spiked land prices in formerly run-down districts such as Digbeth. Foreign owners are effectively piggybacking off public investment into national infrastructure — something the 19th century economist Henry George called “economic rent”, and many modern economists called “rentierism”.
The fires started getting a bit much for me. Partly to escape the conflagrations, I moved into Birmingham’s more ritzy Jewellery Quarter earlier this year. A few days after hauling my stuff into my new flat, I spotted smoke on the horizon. Birmingham’s “Red Palace”, a giant Grade II-listed terracotta masterpiece inspired by New York’s Flatiron Building was ablaze.
After some hurried digging in the Land Registry, the address shared by the Stone Galleon comes up: Road Town, British Virgin Islands. This time, the owner is Brilliant Conch Limited, another “overseas entity” according to Companies House. Yet again, once the fire crews have done their work, I stroll out to inspect the building.
But there are no council notices pinned to the structure. Instead, I see trails of smoke pouring out of a carved Pashtun warrior’s head. “The building is a memorial to Lord Roberts of Kandahar,” I say, to a passerby. “Victorian war hero?” They shrug — and keep on walking.
