The Stadium That Slipped Through the Cracks

What has been bulldozed might not just be a stadium, but a covenant-protected community site, something the city once held in trust for public use.

They didn’t just knock down a few stands and scatter the rubble. They erased decades of Birmingham’s sporting life. Perry Barr Greyhound Stadium, the modern ground on the Walsall Road across from One Stop, has gone. And not just gone, but gone under a darkening cloud of confusion about how and on whose authority.

It wasn’t the original track of course. The first Perry Barr stadium stood where One Stop now squats, before the bulldozers came for that site back in the 1980s to make way for the shopping centre. The racing simply crossed the road and rebuilt on the other side, carrying with it a long and loyal following. For many Brummies, that patch of ground was a last surviving link to nearly a century of dogs, bikes and smoky Saturday nights.

Then, almost overnight, it too was flattened. The grandstand, the terraces, the lights, all gone, leaving a flattened patch of dust and silence where the roar once lived.

Officially, the site is earmarked for 400 new homes. Unofficially, it is now the centre of an investigation into how a landmark tied to the Council’s estate could be demolished without the proper permissions. No planning consent. No prior notification. Just rubble and questions.

According to the Council’s own admission, no application for a Prior Notification of Proposed Development was ever received. Instead, a Section 80 notice under the Building Act 1984 was filed. That is not approval, it is merely a safety formality. In other words, the demolition was logged, not authorised.

What should have been a straightforward redevelopment has become a slow-burn civic mystery. It reaches far beyond Perry Barr itself and deep into how Birmingham manages its land, its heritage and its public trust.

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The response from Planning

As Chair of Planning, Councillor Lee Marsham confirmed that no prior-notification application was ever submitted and that the matter is now under investigation by the Council’s legal and property teams. He has asked officers to explore “all legal options”.

It was a clear and professional response, but beyond that the silence from elsewhere in the Council has been deafening.

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The covenant question nobody will touch

Here is where it gets interesting.

Sources close to the former operators of the stadium believe the land may have carried a restrictive covenant limiting its use to sport, leisure or public amenity. In plain English, that means it could not simply be sold off for housing unless someone formally lifted the restriction.

If that is true, it changes everything. What has been bulldozed might not just be a stadium, but a covenant-protected community site, something the city once held in trust for public use. To sell or redevelop it without clearing that legal hurdle would be, at best, negligent and, at worst, unlawful.

So GRIT asked Birmingham City Council directly: did such a covenant exist, and if so, was it removed or varied as part of any sale or lease?

It is early days yet, but so far there has been no direct answer. Councillor Marsham said he had referred those “wider queries” to the press office, and we await their reply.

When councils go quiet on questions of land, money and process, people start to wonder what exactly they are protecting.

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An authority under scrutiny

For Birmingham City Council, already under the watchful eye of government commissioners after declaring effective bankruptcy, this could not come at a worse time. Public trust in the city’s governance is already fragile. Every unanswered question chips away at it further.

If the Perry Barr land was sold, what was the price? Was that price affected by a covenant? Who signed it off? Which officers and external advisers handled the valuation? And why were the demolition contractors allowed to proceed without so much as a planning notice on the fence?

Councillor Jon Hunt, the Liberal Democrat member for Perry Barr, has already pressed the issue at Full Council, prompting the admission that no application was ever received. The Council says its legal and property teams are looking into it, but whether those findings will ever be made public remains to be seen.

For a city that prides itself on straight dealing, the optics are not good. Bulldozers at work while the paperwork lies missing is never a strong look, especially when the land in question once belonged to the people of Birmingham.

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A short walk from another fiasco

You would think that, after the scandal of the so-called Commonwealth Games village that never was, the ghost development immediately over the road, someone in the Council might have kept a closer eye on the dog track site.

That project, remember, gave us a landscape of confusion and a naming scheme that could have come straight from a satire. Equality Avenue, Inclusion Crescent, Harmony Walk. All very right-on and mood-board friendly, but none of it disguising the fact that the only thing built there in quantity was disappointment.

So you might expect, after that embarrassment, that the anti-cock-up department at Birmingham City Council would have been on red alert. But no. Competence, it seems, has taken the same extended leave as the buildings that never got finished.

The city’s regeneration watchdogs appear to have been gazing at Google Maps rather than the actual skyline, missing the moment the greyhound stadium disappeared from both. A pity really, because it is hard to keep claiming Birmingham is “open for business” when it keeps losing track of what is already open, closed or bulldozed.

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More than nostalgia

This is not just about greyhounds and speedway. It is about civic honesty and how Birmingham manages what it owns. When a public asset is transferred, leased or sold, the process should be transparent, properly documented and open to scrutiny.

If restrictive covenants were quietly lifted, or if the sale terms ignored them, the people deserve to know who authorised it and why.

There is a moral side to it too. The stadium stood as a living part of local culture for generations. Its closure could have been handled with dignity and openness. Instead, it feels like a demolition done in the half-light, leaving the community to pick through the dust for answers.

And perhaps that is the real question. Why does Birmingham so easily allow its icons of working-class sport to disappear without protest? Would we have permitted the bulldozing of Edgbaston Cricket Ground or the Edgbaston Priory Tennis Club to make way for a private and social housing scheme? Somehow, one suspects not.

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What this says about Birmingham City Council

The demolition of Perry Barr Greyhound Stadium without proper permission is not just an oversight. It is a symptom of a deeper culture of complacency, where accountability gets lost between committees and officers shrug off responsibility.

This is a council that cannot manage its finances, cannot protect its heritage, and now seems unable to keep track of its own estate.

Birmingham deserves better. It deserves a council that values its history as much as its housing targets, that treats working-class heritage with the same respect it shows to elite sport. Instead, we are left with another flattened landmark and another set of excuses.

The question now is simple: how many more of Birmingham’s stories will be buried before the Council finally learns to look after the city it serves?