Motorpoint Arena

The utilita arena Birmingham occupies a whole city block on King Edwards Road, and the scale of the building means it dominates the skyline, not in height, but in footprint.

The interior is a single, vast hall, stripped of anything that might suggest permanent loyalty to one sport. The photo evidence is clear: the same wooden floor that hosts a basketball match, with its banked track and synthetic surface, is cleared in minutes to become a stage for a concert or a snooker table. The blue seating rises in tiers on three sides, but the fourth wall is a heavy black curtain, hiding the stage machinery that transforms the room. You can see the trusses overhead, bare and industrial, holding the lights that turn a daytime sporting event into a night-time spectacle.

It opened in 1991 as the National Indoor Arena, a name that reflected its purpose more honestly than the current branding. It has changed its identity several times since, through sponsorship and rebranding, but the structure remains the same: a multi-purpose box designed to hold up to 15,800 people. That capacity is not fixed; the temporary seating shown in the images allows the space to breathe differently depending on whether a rugby match or a pop concert is taking place. It has hosted everything from the Eurovision Song Contest to the Commonwealth Games, but mostly it sits empty, waiting for the next event to arrive.

There is nothing unique about the acoustics here, or the heat, or the smell, which is the same in every indoor arena in the country. What is different is its location. It is the only large venue of its kind in Birmingham, which means it is always busy, always turning over, and rarely still.