If you walk to Port Loop, Urban Splash’s canalside residential development in Ladywood, Birmingham, you approach it via Icknield Port Road and turn into Rotton Park Street. This street bisects the loop of James Brindley’s original wandering 1772 canal and comes to a stop when it hits the straight line of Thomas Telford’s 1827 New Main Line canal. Before reaching the smart new terraces of houses designed by Howells and ShedKM, you pass some empty and neglected old buildings – a sample of the industrial dereliction that previously covered the site before Urban Splash acquired it.

One of those buildings is the intriguing Art Deco concrete salvage depot built by the city council in 1932. It has a wide ramp, up which refuse trucks drove before tipping their contents into an incinerator from the first floor. It is owned by the Canal and River Trust and leased to Urban Splash, who sublease it to an organisation called Civic Square.

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