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Bullet Damage to College Of Law

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Pikeman

Brummie babby
Someone pointed out to me strafing damage to the College of Law building on Great Hampton Street. There are three diagonal gouges in the brickwork near the alarm box. I walk past this building every week day going to work and the more I look at the building the more bullet damage I see.
It used to be Cannings building, not sure if it was during WW2, but I was wondering if anybody knew why it would be so shot up. The railway runs directly behind it before it goes underground, so possibly a train was the target rather than the building itself?
 
There are some accounts of aircraft machine gunning streets in the Bombing Brum thread but probably not the event you are looking for. There were quite a lot of machine gunning incidents but they did not seem to aim at anything in particular.
 
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It is fascinating to know this went on in our own city and the scars are still there to prove it. Strafing the streets does seem an awful thing to do. I suppose there may have even been anti aircraft gun on the roof of the building which may have provided a legitimate target.
 
I might be completely wrong about this but I remember there was a bad car accident in Great Hampton Street involving a member of UB40 or one of their road manager guys (I think he went to prison for a while) which involved the car crashing up the wall of the building and I'm wondering if it was that which caused the marks on the wall? It must have been in the 70s or 80s.
 
A Sparks said:
I might be completely wrong about this but I remember there was a bad car accident in Great Hampton Street involving a member of UB40 or one of their road manager guys (I think he went to prison for a while) which involved the car crashing up the wall of the building and I'm wondering if it was that which caused the marks on the wall? It must have been in the 70s or 80s.
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Strangely enough there have been several car crashes there, railings were put up along the road at one point and within the week a car had hit them. The council (presumably) then built a raised concrete kerb there, presumably as a crash barrier.
The damage to this building is definitely caused by gunfire though. There are diagonal bullet scars at the front and side of the building and to the left of the door the wall is pock marked by scores of bullets hitting it head on. It does appear that the building was targetted.
 
dib44 said:
Mom always told me that the damage to the building was caused by a UXB exploding.
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There may well have been some damage caused by a bomb, but it looks more like bullet damage than a blast. Some marks may have been made by shrapnel from a bomb though. It does seem rather uniform damage though as though it was being shot at. Just seems strange that the building seems to have been targeted.
I imagine a few bombs dropped in the area because it's not.far from the gun quarter, also Lucas's was nearby too.
 
Finally got around to taking a few photos of the possible bullet scarring in the brickwork. The one photo seems to show a downward diagonal series of marks which appears to be shots from above, the other photo shows lots of pockmarks near the doorway of the building and could be bullets striking head on, the third photo is a close up of one of the diagonal marks, this is at a less steep angle and is taken from the side of the building. There are more marks both diagonal and head on around the side of the building too.
 
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