The day ITV changed forever...

From what I can tell it come shorty afterwards.

My apologies: I'd always associated Catchphrase with TVS, not realising that Carlton took it up and produced it at Central's old Lenton Lane studios. Hence why I mistakenly presumed you'd meant Blockbusters. Again, my bad!

But it was where the station's transmission facilities were and, I'm sure, where all decisions were made.. Brum was still very much the capital city of Centraland.

That's why the Nottingham studios were closed entirely, whilst the Birmingham ones deal with the news for all subregions.

I don't really think that adequately describes the reasoning behind the closure of Nottingham - which is simply that it didn't make sense to retain a largely unused studio complex at a time when demand for studios was falling. Had Central not promised to build a new studio complex in Nottingham, keeping all production in Birmingham and just using Giltbrook or a similar small base in the East (and the IBA allowed it) it could just as easily have been Birmingham with the "news gathering centre" and Nottingham(shire) with the actual studios/offices.

It was not meant to be an adequate summary into all the reasons why Nottingham closed. None the less, Birmingham has always been the heart of Central's operations, regardless of where the TV shows were actually made. It was and is, by far the largest city in the region and the base of by far the largest of the two or three subregions. I don't think closing Birmingham and moving all the news to Nottingham was ever seriously considered and wouldn't have been even in your scenario.

Presumably it was HQ of the company and therefore contained a lot of the backend functions.

Saying just ' CA' of is a bit of an understatement, there's a lot more to operating a TV channel than someone in a VO booth.


Well it did happen in a recession and they were confident about their franchise being renewed. Sounds like a good time to invest in some land! Maybe the owners were in trouble and wanting to sell

From what I have read on the net from Ex stafff, Brum was a very low key place even before Carlton got its hands on the company, I think it was always to plan to scale down the building. To be fair I believe alot of the back off stuff had moved to Nottingham, with only Archive, local news, CA and some other regional sales offices at brum. As you say it was a recession and with its knowledge will win and have lots of cash no doubt that is the reason.

Yes, it's not something that would have been done on the spur of the moment. I assume that Gas Street was either purpose built or modified for them so it would have taken a few years to plan and build

Gas Street was purpose built for them with work starting in 1994, some clam it was Carlton, but as you say it very doubtful this was all done on the spar of Carlton taken over. Its more likley Central had been looking around since 1993.

Of course, remember that Central inherited the old ATV Centre building on Broad Street prior to moving to Gas Street, and ATV Centre pretty much became redundant with the requirement to have to construct the Lenton Lane studios so I suppose having had to spend a fortune on those (as opposed to having inherited ATV Centre) meant to make it viable, most if not all production had to be shifted there to get the money's worth. Okay it would have cost to refurbish ATV Centre after the franchise change but cheaper than rebuilding the place...

Lenton Lane's downfall was hastened by the failure of both ITV Digital and Crossroads.

It should've been a region in its own right; perhaps being partitioned when the northern partition took place and the weekday/weekend split was removed. The South & South East franchise is another one. All water under the bridge now though.